Rumors of Insurgency and Assassination in the Ixcán, Guatemala: Special Section: Interpretative Challenges in the Archive: Rumor, Forgery, and Denunciation in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

In the late 1960s, landless campesinos partnered with the Maryknoll Catholic order to form a colony and cooperative in the lowland jungles of northern Guatemala. The Ixcán Grande colony became profitable and fell in line with state development and agrarian policies. Yet by the mid-1970s, this dramatically changed when the colony began experiencing increased government repression as Guatemala’s ongoing civil war escalated. After Father William Woods, the colony’s priest, died in a mysterious plane crash in 1976, multiple accounts of that fateful day circulated: the official version recorded it as an accident while unofficial versions maintained that the military-state had assassinated him. This event shaped the relationship between Ixcán residents and the state from that moment on and continues to influence historical memory in the present. This article first explores the circulation of rumors of insurgency, leading to the Ixcán Grande project’s reputation as an unstable, dangerous space. Then, it examines the competing historical narratives surrounding Father Woods’s death. Finally, it links rumor creation and utilization with historical memory, ending with a brief conclusion about the utility—and the necessity—of giving proper attention to rumors as archival traces.

Father Hennessey tried to calm his nerves. By the evening of November 20, 1976, he still had not received radio communication confirming Father Woods’s safe arrival to Ixcán Grande, a Maryknoll-sponsored colony founded by Indigenous peasants in Guatemala’s northern jungle. The Maryknoll Catholic mission had operated in Guatemala since 1943, primarily working in the highland department of Huehuetenango and by the mid-1960s, in colonization projects like the Ixcán Grande cooperative.¹ That morning, Father William Woods, a pilot, left Guatemala City in the TG-TEX, his Cessna A-185E plane, along with four volunteers. Woods had made this trip hundreds of times. Despite stories from fellow priests who attested to his wild piloting and daring personality, Woods was a skilled pilot who had logged 2,136 flying hours.² Still, Hennessey worried when he did not receive a radio check in, and he finally went to bed in the early morning hours, trying to convince himself that the radio in the Ixcán community was down, as had occasionally happened in the past.

Around 6:45 am on November 21, Hennessey received word from an Ixcán center that the plane never arrived in Belén, the first place Woods was scheduled to land. At 7:00 am, officials confirmed Hennessey’s worst fears when they reported that the plane had crashed, instantly killing all on board. Over the next few hours, details trickled into Maryknoll headquarters in Guatemala City about the fate of the TG-TEX. According to the official Aeronaútica Civil report issued by the Guatemalan government, Woods had recklessly flown into a storm just north of Santa Cruz del Quiché and crashed his plane near the town of San Juan Cotzal. Yet almost immediately, Hennessey began receiving contradictory information. A Wings of Hope pilot, Guy Gervais, who often partnered with Maryknoll, had flown through the area around the same time and insisted that there was not a cloud in the sky. At first, military officials prevented Hennessey from visiting the crash site. When he was able to travel to San Juan Cotzal a couple of weeks later to conduct his own investigation, a local priest told Hennessey that some of his parishioners had seen an explosion in the sky, suggesting that the crash resulted from mechanical failure, sabotage, or a missile hit. In the midst of military rule and a civil war with daily state-sponsored disappearances, foul play certainly would have not seemed unreasonable.³

Thus, immediately following Woods’s death, two competing accounts of the events of November 20 emerged, one based on rumors from below and the other on falsified reports from above. Even before the military state insisted that Woods’s death was accidental, it created and circulated damaging disinformation about the alleged participation of Ixcán Grande residents in the guerrilla movement. Though some residents did join the guerrilla movement, the state falsely maintained that the entire population supported the insurgents. The state narrative used this depiction to justify the militarization of the region, forced disappearances, and eventually, at a national level, state-sponsored genocide. Because of the state’s well-known weaponization of disinformation, by which I mean the transformation of an object—or in this case a speech act—into an instrument of physical and psychological harm, Ixcán Grande residents insisted that the military’s antagonistic relationship with the priest and his colony had culminated in a state-ordered assassination. They insisted that the military state’s narrative of crash-as-accident was a coverup, and that the government masterminded Father Woods’s death because it perceived the “threat” of Ixcán Grande as a direct challenge to its control of the region at a time when the field of battle was shifting north and the civil war was heating up in Guatemala. In fact, the military considered the Ixcán region to be a “red zone,” because of the presence of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, EGP), and it became one of the key theaters of the civil war from the late 1970s through the 1980s.⁴ To this day, people living in Ixcán Grande and closely associated with the region maintain that the military assassinated their priest; they refer to him as the “martyr of the Ixcán.”⁵

The Father Woods case is important beyond the possible assassination because it shows the dynamic interaction of speech acts from above and below and provides an avenue for interrogating the afterlife of rumor, as the popular version of Woods’s death is a cornerstone for the collective memory and identity of people living in Ixcán Grande communities. As Guatemalans continue to debate whether or not genocide occurred, and as Guatemalan courts try former military officials for human rights violations during the civil war, narratives of Woods’s death structure the relationship between Ixcán Grande and the state, a relationship marked by profound distrust, injustice, impunity, and continued struggle.

Archival Smoking Guns?

In researching the history of the Ixcán Grande project, I, like others before me, became fascinated with the question of who killed Father Woods.⁶ Hoping that the Historical Archive of the National Police (AHPN) might provide evidence, I requested that Silvia Méndez, working with me as a research assistant, locate Woods’s file. The AHPN, a secret police archive now open to the public and managed by the Procuraduría de Derechos Humanos (Federal Office of Human Rights), embodies what historian Kirsten Weld refers to as two archival logics: one of counterinsurgency, authoritarian repression and control (the original function of the archive) and a second committed to justice and transparency (the archive’s postwar transformation).⁷ An archive that recorded the terror of the past now gives closure to individuals and provides evidence in legal cases against perpetrators of the violence. The written record for Father Woods was scanty, but AHPN archivists did locate a one-page document with the subheading “Paradigmatic Cases” that listed six people, all of whom were victims of politically motivated, state-sponsored murders.⁸ The final line on this list read “Guillermo [William] Woods, assassinated.”⁹ This appeared to be the smoking gun that every historian dreams of finding in the archive. According to the AHPN, the document was organized in the “received confidential documentation” file of the papers of the Directorate General of the National Police. When I first read this paper, it appeared to be a document that the authoritarian state itself had authored, boasting that Woods’s assassination was a “paradigmatic case” of state-sponsored terror.

But the author of the document was not so clear. As I began to circulate this document among my Maryknoll contacts, they shared it with Guatemalan priests and other individuals who had lived and worked in the Ixcán during the 1980s and had remained connected in church activist circles through the 1996 Peace Accords that formally ended the war. One priest in particular raised doubt about the provenance of the document. He recalled that the United Nations’ Commission of Historical Clarification (CEH), one of the two truth commissions that conducted investigations in Guatemala, used the phrase “paradigmatic cases” to label key assassinations. Therefore, he hypothesized that the document was likely a CEH document that the police had acquired and then archived, not one that they themselves had authored.

Upon further dialogue with AHPN archivists, I learned that the one-page document I received was part of a larger file that Christian Tomuschat sent to Guatemalan President Álvaro Arzú in September 1997 to request information on several disappeared people, including Father Woods. Tomuschat, a German professor of international law, served as the CEH Coordinator and as part of the United Nations’ Human Rights Committee. The complete correspondence file incorporated the same six “paradigmatic cases” that I had originally received with seventeen others, including cases of collective disappearances. The President’s Office passed this request on to the newly formed National Civil Police, which sent some documentation to the CEH, including police reports and newspaper clippings, though they did not admit any state culpability or orchestration of any of the deaths. However, the report provided no information pertaining to Father Woods’s death.¹⁰ It looked like there was no smoking gun, i.e. there was no concrete evidence in which the state admitted to direct involvement in Woods’s death.

As a historian, how was I to make sense of the significance of Woods’s death and integrate it into our wider understanding of the Guatemalan civil war if I could not even confidently categorize it as either an accident or an assassination? The minimal archival material that discusses the event is full of rumor, conjecture, and unverified and competing eyewitness accounts. Written documents such as Woods’s correspondence with the central Maryknoll office, Guatemalan Civil Aeronautics accident reports, and the report from Maryknoll’s independent investigation all provide glimpses into these processes of rumor creation, and in many cases, the authors of these sources reveal their frustration at their inability to gather insights beyond hearsay. Oral histories from several sources—testimonies gathered by the Catholic Church’s own truth commission, accounts collected by Michael Sullivan, a former volunteer pilot who worked alongside Woods in the Ixcán, and my own interviews conducted in 2016—reveal that individuals continued to circulate and reference rumors, revising them and giving them new life decades after their original deployment.

Both the state and military officials and Ixcán Grande residents stand to gain from their different accounts of Woods’s death, and a solid, evidence-based account would potentially challenge the various historical narratives about the experience of the Ixcán Grande colony during the war and alter collective memories used to frame the continuation of Ixcán Grande’s struggle for land rights. The written and oral archives do not provide these answers but only further complicate the unresolved mystery and by extension, challenge any efforts to provide an account of the past rooted in reliable historical evidence. So while solving a forty-five year mystery would certainly be satisfying, it is perhaps more productive to shift our attention to the question of why Father Woods’s case retains so much power and remains the subject of rumors, counter-rumors, and investigations over forty years later. What emerges then is an investigation into the way rumors about Woods’s death and the Ixcán Grande project more broadly have functioned as speech events.

Following William Sewell, historian Lauren Derby has used the term “speech events” to describe popular rumors that operate as more than ephemeral speech acts, or fleeting discussion on the ground, and have the capacity to precipitate structural change.¹¹ In the case of Father Woods and the Ixcán, the initial speech event was imposed from the top down, as disinformation from above framed the colony and Woods as subversive and orchestrated a version of events that dismissed Woods’s death as an accidental, and convenient, plane crash. Individuals used this disinformation without knowing its origin, thus spreading it through all sectors of society as rumor. At the same time, popular rumors also functioned as speech events. In maintaining that Woods’s death was a state-sponsored assassination, these speech events upset relationships between the state and Ixcán residents, shaped resistance movements, and perpetuated a collective identity of a people struggling against the despotic state. In sum, analyzing disinformation and rumor as events underscores how historical actors forged and challenged power relations though unreliable speech acts.

Beyond analyzing the ways that rumors shaped accounts of Woods’s mysterious death and the history of the Ixcán Grande colony, this essay also makes two key arguments for the importance of rumors for historical inquiry: one, it argues that the analysis of rumor creation, weaponization, and deployment provides a means to understand power relations as a contested and ongoing process and two, it calls for serious inquiry into the informative linkages between rumor and collective memory. Rumors demonstrate how people understood relationships to one another and to authority. They serve as an instrument that individuals use to make sense of events happening around them, often by recounting alternatives that they believe to be real possibilities.¹² Both in practice and in the archival record, rumors are a powerful tool of governance when used to categorize people in ways that justify repression and discipline. Simultaneously, they work as a means of resistance by facilitating the entrance into the written record and into collective memory of alternate narratives of the past that challenge authority.¹³

I suggest that historians more directly consider rumor as another analytically rich, subjective component of collective memory studies. When analyzed as part of memory-making, rumors demonstrate “how the past is made to matter,” as various collectives of historical actors create and deploy different versions of what happened.¹⁴ As Peter Burke has argued for memory, rumors also function as historical sources and as historical phenomena, both informing our understanding of the past and showcasing how individuals create and transmit history.¹⁵ These speech acts and events illuminate how and why historical actors created and circulated certain versions of the past and how memories of that past shape the present.¹⁶ By analyzing the ways that rumor shaped interpretations of the circumstances of Woods’s death and how these competing narratives are remembered in the present, we can begin to understand how unreliable speech acts and events inform the creation and maintenance of collective memory.

This essay applies these two theoretical interventions by first analyzing the processes of rumor creation before and after Woods’s plane crash, analyzing how the deployment and weaponization of disinformation and rumor shaped the relationship of the Ixcán Grande colony and the state and also defined what actors understood to be the limits of veracity in the aftermath of Woods’s death. Then, it traces the afterlives of these speech events, arguing that their continued deployment has created a collective memory through which Ixcán Grande residents define their popular struggle against the Guatemalan state.

The Ixcán Grande Colony

In 1966, the Maryknoll order helped Maya peasants from the central and western highlands relocate to the Ixcán region along Guatemala’s northwestern border with Mexico, with the promise of land under the National Institute for Agrarian Transformation’s (INTA) 1962 Agrarian Reform.¹⁷ This was a diverse colony comprised of Indigenous people hailing from various Maya nations across the western highlands, with distinct languages and kinship networks. Together, these colonists formed the Ixcán Grande Cooperative, a network of village centers led by community-directed democratic leadership. From its onset, colonists relied on their priest’s planes and piloting skills to connect them with the rest of Guatemala, and in 1969, Father Woods took over the role of priest-pilot.¹⁸ After the cooperative began cultivating cash crops such as vanilla, cardamom, coffee, and corn, Woods played a critical role in transporting these products to Guatemala City. His increasingly frequent plane trips also brought in supplies, transported people to hospitals, and coordinated volunteer trips to the region, as he was doing on the day he died.¹⁹

During his tenure as the Ixcán Grande priest, Woods served as spiritual guide, pilot, and importantly, connection to the world outside the jungle, helping colonists to navigate national legislation to acquire legal title to their lands in 1974 and sell their products directly to exporters in Guatemala City, increasing the profit they received. Originally from Texas, Woods had a reputation for being what his fellow priests called a “cowboy priest,” wearing a ten-gallon hat, wielding a pistol on his hip, speaking with a slow Texan drawl, and dreaming big. In former priest Thomas Melville’s notes, he described Woods as an “open-spaces man who couldn’t be hemmed in by a lot of rules and regulations…you always got the impression that Bill was ready to settle an argument with his fists if he ran out of logic.”²⁰ Woods had a tendency to stampede through governmental regulations and red tape, as Melville wrote, “often overlook[ing] rules and laws in doing good things for people.”²¹ Woods constantly tried to raise funds to purchase land for the colony, foreseeing the military elite’s land grab that began occurring in the mid-1970s in this remote region.

In 1970, the Guatemalan government designated the Northern Transversal Strip (Franja Transversal del Norte, FTN) a zone of national development.²² Spanning the length of Guatemala across the northern departments of Huehuetenango, Quiché, Alta Verapaz, and Izabal, the zone demonstrated that the military state had finally recognized the subsoil and agricultural potential of a region once thought useless. Critically, the FTN fully encompassed Ixcán Grande. Even prior to the official declaration, military leaders and Guatemalan elite had begun purchasing large tracts of land, displacing and dismissing current residents as squatters, since individuals who maintained a historical connection to the land often did not hold legal title.²³ Multinational companies such as the Shenandoah Oil Company received highly favorable concessions from the government to conduct exploratory drilling and begin construction on roads throughout the region.²⁴

Woods recognized how this sudden attention to the FTN might jeopardize Ixcán Grande colonists’ opportunities and their way of life, so in the early 1970s, he and the cooperative’s leadership began pressing regional and national authorities to title the cooperative’s land as promised. At one point, Woods even suggested that the Ixcán Grande colony split from the municipality of distant Santa Cruz Barillas and be given its own municipal status to facilitate the issuing of legal certificates such as marriage, birth, and death papers, among other bureaucratic functions. This suggestion provoked the ire of Santa Cruz Barillas’ mayor, Gregorio D. Reyes, who wrote to the Departmental Governor Colonel Juan Baltazar Martínez and accused the foreign priest and his parishioners of forming a “Little Cuba,” referencing the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the possibility of guerrillas pulling off a similar event in Guatemala.²⁵ Municipal authorities received Ixcán Grande residents with hostility in 1973 when the latter asked for a municipal official to visit the colony and take the census there rather than require residents to make the arduous multi-day journey to the municipal capital.²⁶ And when the cooperative’s leadership traveled to Guatemala City in 1974 to meet with INTA Director Armando Sandoval Alarcón, they discovered that he had heard this rumor and participated in its circulation. Sandoval Alarcón admonished the Ixcán Grande residents for forming what he repeated was a “little Cuba.”²⁷ Armando was the brother of Mario Sandoval Alarcón, the head of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN), a right-wing anticommunist political party that endorsed paramilitary death squads. Ixcán Grande residents and contemporaries would certainly have understood Armando Sandoval Alarcón’s reference to the Ixcán as a “little Cuba” as a direct threat.²⁸

In the context of a civil war, where the military state was waging a campaign of terror against anyone suspected of leftist political tendencies—what the state called subversion—the accusation of forming a communist society in the remote jungle was a serious charge that would not escape the notice of the state. Rumors were enough to get someone, or a whole community, killed. These accusations were not unique to Guatemala but rather have parallels throughout Latin America. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, it became relatively commonplace for rightwing governments to accuse dissidents of collaboration with Cuba, revealing both the paranoia of anticommunist leadership and the discursive power that Cuba had for shaping public opinion and state policy. Similarly, these episodes demonstrate that both real and imagined connections to Cuban revolutionary ideas and leaders had a profound impact upon the lived experiences of ordinary people in Cold War Latin America.²⁹ In 1970s Guatemala, the state unoriginally and repeatedly linked the Ixcán and its inhabitants to Cuba and thus produced and circulated disinformation to justify the militarization of the region.

Although certainly exaggerated, there was a kernel of truth to the rumor linking Ixcán Grande to the guerrillas. In 1972, a reorganized faction of the Rebel Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes, FAR), a guerrilla movement from the 1960s, clandestinely crossed the Mexican–Guatemalan border into the Ixcán jungle with the intention of building a peasant base for revitalizing the revolution under the new name of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP).³⁰ Some of the leadership had traveled and studied insurgency tactics in Cuba, and in adopting the foco theory as their initial military strategy, they undoubtedly took inspiration from Cuba’s successful 1959 revolution. Thus, at the same time, these exaggerated rumors were circulating through all echelons of state bureaucracy, a very small contingent of Cuba-inspired guerrilla fighters was operating in and around the Ixcán Grande cooperative.

The speech events that produced and perpetuated the disinformation and rumor that the cooperative was a “little Cuba” discursively coded the colony’s space and residents as dangerous, as synonymous with the EGP, and as antithetical to national interests and security. This accusation allowed individuals and institutions who felt threatened by the growing prosperity and size of the colony to change the space from one which the state had ignored to one that figured centrally in the military’s strategy for the duration of the war.

The Death of Father Woods

As the guerrilla insurgency shifted to the western highlands, and as the EGP publicly declared its existence and became more openly active in the region, military repression in the Ixcán began, much to the dismay of Father Woods. When the military disappeared ten colonists from the town of Xalbal without explanation in 1975, Woods traveled to the military base in Santa Cruz del Quiché to protest this action and seek information about the whereabouts of these men. He failed in this regard, but he did succeed in further antagonizing the military officials tasked with overseeing the Ixcán Grande region. And he succeeded in solidifying his reputation for strongly opposing the military’s methods in the Ixcán.³¹

In 1975, the state revoked Woods’s pilot’s license based on intelligence that he was smuggling in arms for the EGP and bringing supplies to help the guerrillas, not just the colonists.³² Woods brother, John, lived in Belize, so Woods frequently flew to visit him, and the military interpreted this activity as suspicious despite the Guatemalan government’s insistence that Belize was a part of Guatemalan national territory, based on a longstanding territorial dispute with Great Britain. According to John Woods, on a few occasions, Woods returned home directly to save precious time and fuel and did not report his flight plans to the authorities.³³ John explained this as a matter of convenience, as the Ixcán Grande colony was much closer to Belize than Guatemala City, where Woods was legally required to land. On another occasion, he had run out of gas en route to Guatemala City, so he landed on the highway and filled his plane with gasoline from a construction crew, then finished the flight to Guatemala City, raising questions about his flight patterns.³⁴ A report by the Diocese of Quiché in 2000 also remarked that Woods had flown directly from the United States to the Ixcán with supplies he had acquired abroad, had installed communication radios between settlements without government permission, and had distributed ammunition to colonists for hunting purposes.³⁵ Together, these actions raised the suspicions of the military state. In 2016, a retired Guatemalan Air Force General who regularly flew to the Ixcán echoed these rumors, recounting that he “remember[ed] that he [Woods] was mentioned as a person that supported the guerrilla…he gave them support, precisely air support and supplies to the guerrilla…”³⁶

A 1996 testimony that an Ixcán Grande resident gave to the Guatemalan Archbishop’s Office of Human Rights (ODHAG) provided another explanation for the military’s suspicion of Woods’s supposed guerrilla ties. Military officials believed that one of Woods’s catechists had joined the EGP. According to the interviewee, Woods reportedly traveled with this catechist “into the mountain,” coded language meaning that one was joining, or at least contacting, the guerrillas. The military interpreted Woods’s reported decision to travel with this catechist as direct support for the guerrillas.³⁷ Because military authorities believed the Ixcán Grande cooperative to be subversive, they were quick to interpret any abnormalities in Woods’s flight patterns, any personal relationships with suspected EGP members, or any irregular daily activities as evidence of support for the guerrilla organization. Within the context of civil war, disinformation led to unsubstantiated rumors, which acquired greater weight and which the military used as justifications for violent repercussions.

On April 13, 1976, the U.S. Ambassador Francis E. Meloy Jr. invited Woods for dinner, where he warned the priest that the Minister of Defense, the Minister of Agriculture, and the Military Commander of Quiché wanted him eliminated.³⁸ Woods believed that this antagonism was simply based on misunderstanding, and he asked Archbishop Hugo Martínez to write letters to these government officials and arrange meetings with them to clarify the purpose of his work.³⁹ When these meetings never materialized, Woods even wrote a letter addressed to President Laugerud García, explaining the humanitarian and spiritual nature of his work and hoping to suppress all rumors about his alleged involvement with the guerrillas.⁴⁰ Although the archival record is not clear, a document written by Archbishop Martínez indicates that upon advice of Woods’s lawyer, he did not actually send the letter to the president.⁴¹

Still, Woods clearly did not dismiss these admonitions as empty threats. Instead, he contemplated exactly how the military might “disappear” him in a way that would not provoke a response from the U.S. government. A few months prior to his death, Woods had written to his family, explaining that as his plane crossed the mountains just north of Santa Cruz del Quiché, it would dip down into the valley within clear view of the military base, where it would be an easy target. He predicted that if the military wanted to kill him, this was the exact location where they might do so.⁴²

By November 20, as Woods planned once again to complete the 55-minute flight over the mountains and down into the Ixcán, he recognized how rumors and disinformation had strained his already tenuous relationship with Guatemalan military authorities. Woods’s pilot’s license was current at the time of flight, he had passed a physical exam in January, and the TG-TEX had passed a flight-worthiness inspection on August 19, 1976. Further, the plane’s maintenance records showed that it had been regularly serviced.⁴³ Four passengers—two affiliated with Maryknoll and two who worked for the Direct Relief Foundation—decided to travel with Woods despite receiving an ominous warning from a military official not to fly with him to the Ixcán.⁴⁴ The plane took off at 10:01am.

The following morning, Aeronáutica Civil informed Father Hennessey that the plane had crashed just north of Santa Cruz del Quiché, the precise location where Woods had predicted the military would shoot him down. By evening, the Guatemalan Air Force had transported the remaining dismembered body parts of the victims to the Funerales Reforma funeral home in Guatemala City, where friends and family attempted to identify their loved ones, using pieces of clothing as well as distinguishing physical features such as beards and hair color to confirm their deaths. All that remained of Father Woods was a severed arm, still wearing the denim jacket used to identify him.⁴⁵

In order to release the bodies to the families for burial, Guatemalan law required that the funeral home be provided with medical reports and that the deaths be recorded in the civil registry in the municipality where they had occurred. Hennessey, accompanied by U.S. Consul Howard Cross, two other Maryknoll personnel, and a representative from the funeral home, flew to the department of Quiché where they met with Doctor Dardón, who by midnight had written up the necessary medical reports. The next day they traveled to San Juan Cotzal, but the military did not allow them to visit the crash site. After waiting for five hours, the group finally received confirmation that authorities had filed the deaths in the civil registry. Finally, the families of these victims could transport their loved ones’ remains home and conduct funeral and burial services. On November 23, Bill Woods’s funeral was held in Guatemala, and the next day, his body was placed in the Maryknoll vault in Huehuetenango. Woods’s friend and long-time advocate, Bishop Martínez, celebrated the mass, and Woods’s mother Ann Woods, his sister Dorothea Wedelich, and his two brothers John and James, attended the service, mourning the untimely death of their son and brother, respectively.⁴⁶ Ixcán Grande residents mourned his death as well. In the words of one colonist, Mariano Martín Pablo, “We were left like orphans.”⁴⁷ This event served as the beginning of the founding myth of Woods as the martyr of the Ixcán, and it also made clear to Ixcán Grande colonists that they were now under siege from the Guatemalan government.

Two written reports documented competing versions of the event: the Civil Aeronautics investigator, Natzúl René Méndez, wrote the official account while Father Hennessey conducted an independent investigation. Méndez filed the official crash investigation report on November 25, 1976, specifying the flight’s departure at 10:01am, which Maryknoll affiliates present at the airport had also confirmed. Yet a biannual report from the Head Police Division of the Department of Quiché, where the crash took place, later reported that the accident was registered at 9:30am, which would have been before the plane even took off. The report also put scare quotes around the description, referring to it as an “Accidente ‘Aéreo.’” No other entries in the report carry such quotation marks.⁴⁸

Investigator Méndez also cited poor weather conditions and dangerous piloting as the reasons for the crash. He wrote, “The accident was caused by bad weather in that area, rain, a cloudy sky…Mr. Wood [sic], as one who knew the area well, over-estimated his possibilities.”⁴⁹ However, the crash took place in late November, Guatemala’s dry season, so rain during this time of year would have been very rare, and locals would have rightly been skeptical of poor weather as the rationale for the crash.⁵⁰ Even though the attached weather report from Civil Aeronautics’ Weather Division stated that during the window of the crash, the wind was very slight, visibility unlimited, with no clouds or precipitation, Méndez still maintained that “local topographical conditions in the locale of the accident” created conditions that were “not good to carry out a visual flight.”⁵¹ Soldiers from the nearby base had arrived first to the scene, and the Army Specialist who oversaw the search team told U.S. Embassy officials that “it was raining and completely clouded over.”⁵² In addition, both the Army Specialist and Méndez claimed that the plane had caught fire upon impact, burning its remnants and the passengers’ bodies. Rather curiously, Méndez had not been an investigator for very long; until recently, he had been employed by Civil Aeronautics as a gardener. Hennessey later reported that Méndez had not even set foot on the crash site but had actually completed his report based on his observations while flying over the area in a helicopter.⁵³ In a private letter, Hennessey later claimed that this Civil Aeronautics’ report had “little to do with the reality.”⁵⁴

Father Hennessey returned to San Juan Cotzal in early December, shortly after receiving the official report, in order to conduct his own unofficial investigation. Although Hennessey’s report emphasized inconsistencies with the official record and offered some evidence of foul play, as Maryknoll superior, he carefully avoided directly indicting the military so as not to jeopardize Maryknoll’s continued presence in Guatemala. After all, the Guatemalan government had nearly expelled the Maryknoll order in 1967 when national newspapers published reports that three Maryknoll priests and a nun had become involved in the guerrilla movement. The Maryknoll superior to Central America at the time worked to regain the government’s blessing to work in the Guatemalan highlands, while priests and local catechists became targets in the ongoing civil war.⁵⁵ Thus, less than a decade later, Hennessey knew he had to tread carefully with the Woods case, and he inconclusively ended his report with the suggestion that no concrete evidence of foul play existed, despite inconsistencies with the official version of the plane crash.⁵⁶

Hennessey wholly based his report on witness testimonials and his own observations, thus providing a vital firsthand account of the theories produced and deployed in this moment. Hennessey did note that he found it curious that while the official report cited bad weather, no one had mentioned inclement conditions when he had briefly visited the community to get the death certificates. Nor had he noticed any smell of smoke on the bodies or the personal effects. What he learned during his December visit confirmed his doubts and gave him cause to question the official narrative. The local priest, Father Axel Mencos Méndez, told Hennessey that he had left Cotzal at 11:00 am that morning, and there had been no clouds. His parishioners had told him that it never clouded over or rained. Another pilot, Guy Gervais, later confirmed that he also made several trips that day through the same area, and the weather was completely clear.⁵⁷

Hennessey also visited the crash site, noting that there were no signs of fire, as the official report claimed; the brush under the remnants of the plane was not singed, there was no smell of smoke or spilled gasoline, and none of the remaining plane parts onsite were charred. The plane’s fuselage was buried in the side of the mountain, but oddly, none of the nearby trees appeared to have been damaged by the crash. When Hennessey retrieved the plane’s engine, the local telegraph operator, a man named Abelino, reported that a soldier had pushed it down the mountain, explaining why Hennessey found it nearly thirty feet away from the crash site.⁵⁸ Hennessey also remarked that there were no bullet holes in the wreckage that he examined, but he noted that the windshield and side windows were all missing.

Eyewitness reports and oral histories further complicated the investigation and future efforts to piece together evidence in a reliable narrative. A group of workers traveling in the back of a pick-up truck to the nearby San Francisco estate reported that the plane had exploded in the air.⁵⁹ Years later, Luis Gurriarán, a priest who worked at a colonization project near the Ixcán and was a friend of Woods, reported that peasants had witnessed a helicopter of soldiers arrive in San Juan Cotzal the morning of the crash. According to Gurriarán, these soldiers had positioned themselves on the hill and shot rockets at the tail of the plane. The priest claimed that the parish hid these testimonies out of fear when the army came looking for eyewitnesses. To protect their parishioners, neither he nor Father Axel had come forward at the time to report this alternate version of events, as they knew such actions would likely result in more “disappearances.”⁶⁰

However, Hennessey questioned these accounts of an explosion, as he thought that the wreckage and victims would have been more widely scattered than they were. Then again, he also recognized that he had not been allowed to see the crash site until several weeks after the incident. Still other witnesses reported that the plane was smoking as it turned onto its side and rapidly descended. Again, Hennessey found this explanation problematic, as there were no signs of fire in the wreckage that he saw. Father Axel warned Hennessey to be wary of accepting testimonies at face value; he worried that the military had paid some of these witnesses to either remain silent or tell a specific account of that day.⁶¹ It is also important to recognize that the military occupied the region at the time of the crash and that disappearances of those who challenged military authority were common. It is not surprising that locals might have been willing to disseminate the version that the military preferred or to keep silent about what they actually heard and saw.

The hierarchies of power in war-torn Guatemala structured what version of Father Woods’s death became official, who could openly share what they saw, heard, and experienced, and who could not. Fear and a tenuous relationship with the military state required careful choice with speech acts, and the circulation of competing accounts about the crash indicates that people made strategic choices about how to survive and at times, resist, the military state. The death of this outspoken priest coupled with the persistence of rumors surrounding the colony and the plane crash further exacerbated already high tensions between colonists and the military. These rumors, while perhaps not all accurately revealing the past exactly as it happened, are historically useful in the sense that they reveal asymmetries of power that the parties very much felt.⁶² While the rumors surrounding Woods’s crash and death do not render a clear, verifiable account of the morning of November 20, they do demonstrate the very tangible threats that Guatemalan peasants and foreign priests, among many others, experienced in this historical moment.⁶³ In this case, the state essentially built a smear campaign against a priest based on disinformation and rumor, then weaponized these speech acts as it framed the Ixcán as a subversive region and its priest as a guerrilla sympathizer. In the aftermath of Woods’s death, the military state operated with unparalleled violence and impunity in the region.

Based on top-down disinformation, the military state labeled the region “subversive” and claimed that residents directly supported the EGP. The state’s perpetuation of these claims rendered Ixcán Grande colonists as threats to the nation, a campaign that culminated in the military’s dehumanization of the colonists and in the state-sponsored violence, land grabs, scorched earth policies, and genocide of the late 1970s and early 1980s. By 1982, the military had burned all the cooperative’s centers to the ground and indiscriminately massacred residents—men, women, and children—in horrific ways. Those who did survive these atrocities either fled to Mexico, where they lived for over a decade in refugee camps, or they became internal refugees and joined the Communities of Population in Resistance, communities that lived in hiding in jungles and mountains, constantly fleeing from the military. Yet even as they fled and struggled to survive, they carried the memory of Father Woods with them, and it shaped their ongoing efforts at resistance and framed their collective identity during the war and in its aftermath.

Father Woods as a “Past Presence”: Collective Memory, Identity, and Martyrdom

Shortly before he died, Father Woods gave Ixcán Grande colonist Mariano Martín Pablo the wooden cross that he had received on the day of his ordination, as a sign that God would help Mariano with health problems he faced, telling him to “take care of it, and respect it.” In 1982, when Mariano fled from the military’s violence, he carried the crucifix with him, keeping it during his years as an internally displaced person in hiding, then during the time he lived in a refugee camp in Chiapas, Mexico. In 1993, refugees began returning from Mexico with UN backing.⁶⁴ In 2016, he still cared for this cross, keeping it safely displayed in his home in Mayalán, where he returned after the war’s conclusion.⁶⁵ He definitely believes that Woods was a martyr, murdered by the government.

Mariano’s story demonstrates how the rumors that individuals created in 1976 continued to circulate and began to shape the collective memory of Ixcán Grande residents. The contemporary creation and less open circulation of alternate accounts of Father Woods’s death reinforced the highly unequal power relationship that existed between colonists and the military state. These rumors further cemented the distrust and disdain that many Ixcán Grande residents felt toward the national government and reaffirmed residents’ recognition that the state did not, and would not, support their efforts to acquire land and improve their marginalized status. As Ixcán Grande colonists fled from military repression, these rumors became clandestine memories, counterhegemonic versions of the past whose perpetuation depends on their ability to be viewed as true and as important components of individuals’ narratives, but memories that are never fully controlled by any one person. This corpus of rumor as clandestine memory functions as a “past presence” by obliging individuals to remember the community’s sacrifices and hardships while compelling them to allow this past to shape their collective and individual identities in the present.⁶⁶

Both ODHAG testimonies and the oral histories that volunteer pilot Michael Sullivan recorded, transcribed, and translated demonstrate how a backwards look at the past leeches out any uncertainty that remained in the minds of participants, thus solidifying the transformation of a rumor-based narrative into a clandestine memory. As ODHAG staff collected testimonies, interviewers began to categorize Woods’s death as an “extrajudicial killing,” and several informants referenced Woods’s death as the beginning of the military’s repression of the area. As one informant reportedly said, “The first move that they [the military] did was follow and persecute the priest, Father Guillermo Woods” to the point of killing him in 1976, thus marking Woods’s death as initiation of more widespread military violence in the local periodization of the war.⁶⁷ Another interviewee declared that the repression began when the government decided to believe that Woods was a guerrilla leader and that they “were looking for a way to betray him, [so] they killed him in his airplane” and then began to kidnap and disappear people.

Other testimonies pointed more directly to details of the crash itself, still identifying the military as the perpetrators. For example, one stated that the “government turned against the Father and burned his plane.”⁶⁸ Still another elaborated further, remarking that “they [the military] brought him down in San Juan Cotzal” because of Woods’s efforts to obtain land titles and thus prevent petroleum companies and wealthy landowners from acquiring land in the region. Building on this trope of state and multinational jealousy, another echoed that the military turned against Woods because of his supposed guerrilla connections and because the cooperative had been very successful.⁶⁹ In these examples of ODHAG testimonials that mention Woods, it is clear that his death, which informants unquestionably considered an assassination, was a watershed moment for the broader cooperative’s collective memory, a date that they use to clearly mark the transition from their designation in the state’s eyes as a successful colonization project to a region ripe with subversion.

About fifteen years after the ODHAG interviews, from 2010 to 2012, former volunteer pilot Michael Sullivan visited the Ixcán, collected oral histories, and then transcribed and translated twenty-eight of these in order to compile an English-language account of Ixcán Grande’s history. As in the ODHAG testimonies, informants repeated the rumor that the military assassinated Woods as fact, emphasizing that the military believed him to be a guerrilla leader and put him on a hit list.⁷⁰ By 2010, this narrative, which had been a clandestine memory in 1976 and was still protected by the anonymity of the ODHAG interviews, had become a foundational component of the Ixcán’s collective history, one that participants openly attached to their oral history and their names. For example, one interviewee linked Woods’s death to his own fight to reclaim and maintain his land.⁷¹ Notably, interviewees repeatedly credited Woods with acquiring legal title for the cooperative’s lands before his death, an act that would allow returning refugees to reclaim their land from the state’s efforts to redistribute it in the mid-1990s. Alfonso Monzón Martínez remarked that Woods’s unceasing efforts to acquire these titles had cost him his life.⁷² Ixcán Grande residents define their collective purpose as carrying on the mandate that Woods had given them, which was to keep their land and work hard to develop self-sustaining communities. As Alejandro Ramírez Cruz stated in 2010, “Padre Bill was assassinated. He was for the poor. He blessed our lives. He shed his blood for us—the indigenous and the poor. He gave us a piece of land, and we improved our lives. The good thing is we haven’t lost the seeds he planted with us.”⁷³ José Díaz Perez also utilized this metaphor, designating the cooperative as “the root that Padre Guillermo left us. It is his seed that still exists. What he planted we won’t lose.”⁷⁴

Part of the process of building community in the jungle was developing a new sense of collective identity and symbols to represent this cohesion. The acquisition of land and legal ownership marked a key moment in the region’s history, one for which residents credit Woods. The shared experience of state violence, displacement, loss, and survival forged bonds between disparate towns in the colony. Additionally, the rumors from below, created in the aftermath of Woods’s death, coalesced to form this collective memory and shared history of common struggle, as discussed above. As individuals defiantly forged these rumors in relation to and as a response to those from above, they engrained these clandestine memories into the collective history of the colony. Residents consider Father Woods to be their martyr, a symbol of this collective forging.

The framework of Woods as martyr was not part of the original narrative but emerged later, in a context replete with clear cases of state-sponsored assassinations of Catholic leaders, not to mention the countless disappearances and murders of Catholic laypeople and catechists throughout the region. Father Óscar Romero’s murder in El Salvador in 1980 for his outspoken critique of the military regime, the 1998 death of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala City immediately after the publication of the Truth Commission report which he oversaw, and the 1981 shooting of Father Stanley Rother in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, for supporting his congregation during military occupation were all high profile cases in which priests died at the hands of the military regime.⁷⁵ Ixcán colonists reframed the memory of Woods’s death in the context of these later killings, infusing martyrdom into this clandestine memory, and thereby making an unproven account of this event seem more probable and factual.

In the aftermath of the 1996 Peace Accords, survivors of the war returned to the Ixcán and began the process of rebuilding their communities and reinstating the cooperative. On May 5, 2000, Ixcán Grande residents celebrated a mass to commemorate the relocation of Father Woods’s body from Huehuetenango to the new church in Mayalán, the Ixcán Grande center where he had lived. Bishop Martínez gave the homily, and this speech captured how the rumors surrounding Woods’s death continued to lend credibility to an account of the past that Martínez believed possible and that framed the present challenges facing Ixcán Grande. He described Father Woods as an “extraordinary man, active, challenging everything: time, speed, and danger.” After detailing how he had intervened on behalf of Woods with various government ministers and even with President Laugerud García himself, Martínez lamented that “they killed him, just as the Minister of Defense had said.”⁷⁶

In presenting Woods’s death as a state-sponsored assassination, orchestrated at the highest levels of government, Martínez helped to discursively frame Mayalán’s new church and altar to Father Woods as a space that recounted an alternate narrative of history that resisted and rejected the official version of events. Not only does this site keep alive the uncertainties surrounding Woods’s death, but it also allows competing rumors to crystallize into collective memory that daily reminds residents of their tenuous relationship to the state. This clandestine memory thus publicly contests the official version, as residents and church officials keep these rumors alive and sustain them, causing this alternate telling of November 20 to become the accepted version of events for those outside of the Guatemalan military.

On November 20, 2016, I traveled to Mayalán in the Ixcán with several Maryknoll Fathers and Sisters to attend the fortieth anniversary mass of Father Woods’s death. The Maryknoll order and John Woods had helped finance the recent renovation of the local church, which on that day was decorated with large banners that prominently displayed a photograph of Father Woods with the caption “profeta y mártir del Ixcán” (see Figure 1).

Inside the whitewashed church, to the left of the main altar reside Woods’s remains (see Figure 2). Pictures from Woods’s time as the colony’s priest adorn the altar that residents frequently decorate with fresh flowers and candles. The celebration lasted well into the night, with residents preparing and sharing a meal together, telling stories about Padre Guillermo (Father William), and laughing and crying as they remembered their joys and trials during the war. A youth organization sold t-shirts with a quote attributed to Father Woods imploring colonists not to sell their land or their souls, as this would make him ashamed, once again linking this alternate retelling to the popular struggle of the present.

In other words, for Ixcán Grande residents, their version must be true, as it undergirds their collective identity and reason for persisting against the injustice of the present. As the Diocese of Quiché’s truth commission report remarked, it was the “unanimous opinion of all informants” that the military had assassinated Woods.⁷⁷ Rituals such as these annual masses serve as opportunities for the community to gather, to remember, and to actively recreate the rumors of the past as the truths of the present.⁷⁸ Throughout the entire celebration, residents repeatedly remarked that Woods had given his life for them and for their land, and they would continue to fight for their communities and their rights. His death—and the rumors that circulated around this historical moment—function as a foundational event in the history of Ixcán Grande.

Conclusion

Rumors shape the past, the present, and the future, structuring competing realities that frame how individuals view themselves and their relationships to each other. The military’s creation and diffusion of disinformation brought very real material and bodily harm to Ixcán Grande residents. However, these speech acts from above are not singular or solitary creations. The very nature of rumor as a speech act that permits some anonymity allowed for the creation of alternative versions that better corresponded with how individuals understood their realities and the tangible threats and limitations that they faced. Particularly within an authoritarian regime, constructing and disseminating rumors provided a means for individuals to produce knowledge that directly contradicted and challenged those in power. These rumors from below operated in dialogue and in constant interaction with disinformation from above, even becoming clandestine memories that transformed into foundational events. While these speech acts and events may not be able to provide a verifiable narrative of a series of events in the past, they can elucidate a credible account of relations of power and the ways that people forged spaces for themselves under highly unequitable circumstances. This revelatory power of rumors emphasizes their methodological significance and importance as a means of discussing and analyzing voices either objectified, decentered, or wholly erased from the official narrative of a historical moment.

I would like to thank Rachel Nolan, Vanessa Freije, Michelle Chase, and the anonymous reviewer for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article. Funding from the Oklahoma Humanities Council, the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, Indiana University, and Oklahoma State University facilitated the research for the project. Most of all, I am grateful for the individuals who shared their life stories and memories of Padre Guillermo with me and the archivists at the ODHAG, the AHPN, and Maryknoll for their assistance.

Endnotes