Memento of the Living and The Dead – excerpts
Frank McGinty
The Phil and Angie Berryman Family Flee Guatemalan Violence in 1980
From the Preface of “Memento of the Living and the Dead, a First-Person Account of Church, Violence and Resistance in Latin America” by Phillip Berryman [Resource Publications, Eugene Oregon]
“…Don’t come back to Guatemala. We have to leave as soon as possible,” said Angie on the phone. “I’ll meet you with the kids in Miami.” I was in Nicaragua and had planned to go to Honduras and then return to Guatemala.
…It was July 1980 and we had been living in Guatemala for four years, working for the American Friends Service Committee [AFSC], the Quaker-rooted peace organization. We had seen signs that we were under surveillance by Guatemalan military or police: a man taking our license plate number as Angie came out of the office of the umbrella organization of Catholic religious orders, mysterious phone calls asking for me, a suspicious person claiming to deliver flowers we had not ordered, and especially a man looking like a plain clothes police agent standing across the street from our house all day long-about once a week for a couple of months.
…We could be under suspicion for various reasons- travel to nearby countries, especially Nicaragua, where the revolutionary Sandinista government had been in power for a year; association with activists in church, labor, and peasant organizing; foreign journalists and representatives of human rights organizations visiting our house; or possibly documentation that I had done anonymously on political violence in Guatemala. None of these activities should be a crime, but increasingly people were being abducted and ‘dis-appeared’.……
…Angie went with our daughters-Catherine, Maggie, and Lizzy—ages four, two and two months- to stay with an American- Canadian couple for some protection. She and friends and colleagues spent hours burning papers and files. Arriving at the airport on the morning of departure, she was told that their flight was can-celled. When she went back to the parking lot and got into the car, Angie realized that she was being followed by two men in a vehicle, even when she made diversionary turns. They stopped only when our friend with the diplomatic license plates inserted his car between them. She and our daughters caught an afternoon flight, and we rendezvoused in Miami late at night and flew to Philadelphia the next morning. In the next few weeks and months some of our friends were abduct-ted and ‘disappeared’; others went underground or into exile.
…This memoir tells the story of how I came to that point and what happened afterward.”
Phil and Angie Berryman are members of St. Malachy Parish
and friends of CPF
