This is a drawing I made the 13th of April 1981 in the afternoon, around 2 o'clock in the afternoon. According to the calendar it should have been a sunny day, but it was very cloudy - which in fact seems very appropriate when you think about what happened.  
 
     In the evening of the 12th of April 1981 I was told by an American employee from the organisation "Agua del pueblo" ("Water for the people") that they had destroyed a village close to Chimaltenango, which is situated about 30 kilometres from Antigua where I lived at that time. So that night I decided to go there - of course, we talked almost all night about what had happened, because a lot of people had testified that the army was responsible for the massacre. 
 
      And that's why I decided to go there with this employee early the next day - go to this village called Chuabajito close to Chimaltenango. 
 
      The next day, on the 13th of April 1981 we went there on his motorbike and I brought big papers for drawing which I found out wasn't very good technically - all the drawings I've made later on have all been on smaller paper - I found out that it causes a lot of attention when an artist starts painting in big paper surrounded by all the dead people.... But in fact, that's what I did....  
 
      Today I can still think about that I actually did it - it was my first drawing of the violence that the people of Guatemala experienced in those years - there was a civil war, you know - In fact, I don't know why I did it, I didn't have to do it, at least that wasn't the reason why I was in Guatemala - I was there for other reasons. But I did it and over the years I made more drawings and so, this one is the very first.  
 
     When we came to the village, our first impression was almost indescribable: The smell was horrible - a disgusting smell of dead people.... And this drawing is from the little church in Chuabajito, which had been constructed recently - that was where they had killed them.... 23 men where lying there, stacked on top of each other. The first time you see something like that, it's very hard to realise that what you see are actually dead human beings. When you have never experienced the violence directly and you're not used to this kind of problems, it's very difficult to put yourself in the place of these crying women, at least it was for me, but I started drawing - and what you see here is what it was like to be there. 
 
      But I remember how I reacted afterwards when we left, because I left immediately after, and that was that I got very sick, I was sick for weeks after and for a long time I couldn't draw anything at all - I remember that I thought I had to send this drawing to Denmark, because I wanted them to publish it in all the newspapers etc., but very quickly I realised that nobody really cared about what was going on in Guatemala. And I also realised that this kind of drawings can cause you a lot of trouble - and that's why I hid them....  
 
 
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