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Outrage as Guatemalan Maya Spiritual Guide is Tortured and Burned Alive

Domingo Choc Che’s final moments captured on video
Four men held after attack on indigenous elder

Irish Central, 11 JUN 2020

https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/...0588187372.jpg

Police in Guatemala have arrested four men on suspicion of murder after a respected indigenous Maya spiritual guide was tortured, doused in gasoline and burned to death after being accused of witchcraft.

Domingo Choc Che, 55, an expert on traditional herbal medicine who had worked with researchers from University College London, was seized from his home in the village of Chimay on Saturday night by a group of men.

The abductors accused him of carrying out a ceremony on a family grave and tortured and beat him for more than 10 hours before setting him alight on Sunday morning, according to a local prosecutor. Three other suspects remain at large.

A widely shared video of his final moments shows Choc Che running in flames and begging for help before collapsing. Nobody comes to his assistance.

His murder has prompted indignation in Guatemala and beyond, and evokes dark memories of the country’s genocidal civil war, in which the indigenous population was subject to systematic cruelty.

“We are indignant. How is it possible that our own people could behave so ignorantly?” said Jose Che, the secretary of Guatemala’s Relebaal Saqe association of councils of spiritual guides.

“There has been discrimination and racism against Maya people for a long time. They do not respect our cosmovision, our spirituality.”

Choc Che was an ajilonel, or specialist in Mayan medicine, but he had participated in a string of scientific research projects, and worked to conserve traditional knowledge and herbal remedies.

“We lost a library of knowledge and a grandfather who had a vast knowledge of medicine and how to care for the land,” said Mónica Berger, a sociologist and anthropologist at the University of the Valley of Guatemala.

Choc Che was one of 30 participants in a project launched in May 2019 to document traditional medicinal plants in the remote department of Petén. The project was launched in collaboration between University College London, Zurich University and the University of the Valley.

“This is an atrocity, a huge violation of the most basic human rights and leaves one with a feeling of helplessness,” said Michael Heinrich, a biologist at UCL. “The project must continue in his memory.”

The murder has prompted comparisons to the dark history of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.

Between 1960 and 1996, more than 200,000 people were killed and another 45,000 disappeared, many of whom were civilians. According to a UN-back truth commission, 80% of victims of human rights abuses during the war were indigenous, leading the UN and Catholic church to designate the violence against indigenous people as acts of genocide.

“He was an example of a respectful and tolerant Guatemalan who spoke between cultures and generations,” Berger said. “But now his death has become a symbol of a systemic problem.”

The 1996 peace accords for the first time recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples to their traditions and spirituality. But persecution continues against those who practice Maya spiritualism, which is often referred to as “witchcraft” by conservative Christian religious groups.

“Prior to the peace accords there was a clear persecution of Maya spiritual guides and traditional herbalists,” said Claudia Samayoa, one of the founders of the human rights organization Udefegua.

“But Guatemala has not managed to dismantle this vision from colonial times that practicing ‘witchcraft’ deserves death,” Samayoa said. “There are neo-pentecostal churches and some expressions of Catholicism that continue to consider the practice of Maya spirituality as a form of witchcraft.”