Rosa (not her real name, and I’ve changed other details to protect her) is a middle class Guatemalan woman in her early thirties. She lives in Guatemala City with her husband and three school-age children, and tries to maintain a normal family life for the sake of her kids and her security.

The kids are bright and creative. Daniel, at 9, writes poetry that reveals an awareness of, and pain for, the injustice around him. The parents try to pass on to their children their dream that a better life is possible here, and keep doors open for them in the walls of limitations that the society imposes.

Rosa knows many people who were “disappeared” never to return during the last ten years. She and her friends try to guess which of their acquaintances were tortured by the army – maybe the sullen beggar whose face lights up when he thinks he recognizes someone … “You were there, I know you! … We were building something … you were there … a machine … we participated! … we fought! …” She knows people living clandestinely in the city, cut off from their families, pale and drawn, given to sudden laughter or long withdrawn silences.

Despite the new civilian government and their much-vaunted “democratic opening”, the army and the oligarchy remain firmly in control of the country, the machinery of repression is still in place, and people are still being “disappeared” or killed by death squads at the same rate as in the last year of the military regime, according to the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission and others.

The government, very upset at the “bad press” their country received abroad during “the violence” earlier in this decade, is working hard to change its image and restore the flow of aid. But Rosa and her friends are being careful. They assume their phones are tapped. For sensitive conversations we would move to the back of the apartment, since Rosa suspects that the janitor listens. She calculates her security: having lots of neighbours, relatives, kids and even a few foreigners coming and going from her apartment decreases the attention that may be called to her by the visits of any particular people.

There are places she would never go, such as the office of the Mutual Support Group of the Families of the Disappeared (GAM), because it is watched. And she is careful of her conversations in public places, a tactic I had to learn over and over again. For example, chatting on a city bus, we were reminded of the film Gandhi. I mentioned that I had known someone whose father had actually survived the massacre at Amritsar, a very disturbing scene in the film. But massacres are too recent and controversial in Guatemala to be discussed on a bus. Rosa turned to me with a broad smile, definitively changing the subject, “Isn’t my sister’s baby gorgeous?!”

In my many conversations with her, although she was eager to have me understand what life was like for her, she stopped short of telling me exactly what she and her friends are doing, and how. There is a careful dissemination of information and ideas. The are plans for development projects and cultural projects, perpetually frustrated for lack of money – things which we do in Canada without worrying about the attention it may call to us. Obtaining financing from abroad, even from sympathetic development agencies, is difficult because for safety’s sake they can’t supply many details. Getting the information out of the country through a tampered post or border searches is hardly a sure thing. Moreover, they feel that people abroad, even Guatemalan exiles, don’t understand these and other conditions under which they are working.

Rosa says, “Now is the time to talk.” The opposition organizations were hit so hard during the violence, which successfully re-established army control in the countryside and terror in the city, that what remains of the Left is still reeling, picking itself up off the canvas and looking around for new ways to go on living and to continue the struggle. Rosa says, “I want to live!” – to live fully, which for her includes being able to create and enjoy the creations of others – in theatre, for example. And it means being able to work for a society in which the means of expression, as well as the means of production and of self-determination are not the exclusive property of the miniscule minority of businessmen and army officers who run the country.