Santiago Atitlán – The Mural Project
Portraits commemorating the December 2 massacre

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Santiago Atitlán is a village of 45,000 (about 85% indigenous Mayans) located under the peaks of three volcanoes that ring the mile-wide Lake Atitlán in the Guatemalan highlands. It may well be the most beautiful place on earth, a town of Mayans in brilliantly woven traditional clothes on the shores of a lake with water somehow bluer than the sky it reflects.  During the civil war in Guatemala, Santiago was occupied by the military.  Some 3,000 villagers were killed or disappeared.  On December 2, 1990, in a spontaneous uprising, the town threw out the military and then the guerillas – and declared peace. 

The uprising of December 2 has been studied, analyzed and reported on.  But the magic has never been explained.  At 10:00 at night, two drunk soldiers in town were annoying a young girl and some villagers escorted them back to the military base.  By the time they'd walked the half-mile to the barracks about a thousand townspeople had joined the escort, demanding to speak with the commander about the behavior of his soldiers.  Within another hour, some five thousand unarmed villagers had gathered in front of the military post.  That's when the soldiers opened fire.  Eleven died at the scene, some forty more were wounded.   The people of Santiago Atitlán did not move.  By dawn, thousands more had gathered at the military outpost and the vastly outnumbered soldiers retreated from the town.  Immediately organizing their own security patrols, the townspeople told Guatemala's president that they themselves would keep the guerillas out, if the military would never again set foot in their village.  On December 3, the people of Santiago buried their dead and resigned from their country's war – the first town to declare peace, and achieve it.  In December of 1996, all of Guatemala followed suit and national peace accords were signed.

This mural of photographs consists of 270 portraits of the people of Santiago, representing the crowd that refused to move when the soldiers opened fire.  It was unveiled in the town, where most people have never seen a photograph of themselves, on December 2, 1997 – the seventh anniversary of the Santiago massacre, and the first anniversary of the Guatemalan peace accords.

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