Books
and Articles
Kent Ashabranner, Children
of the Maya; A Guatemalan Indian Odyssey Dodd, Mead 1986.
Written
for Youth. Recounts the persecution and genocide of the Mayan Indians in Guatemala
by the Guatemalan government. Not for all children.
Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert
F. Spirer, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection,
American Association for the Advancement of Scienceshr. See aaas.org/guatemala/ciidh/qr/english/
Edgar
Alfredo Balsells Tojo, Olvido o memoria : el dilema de la sociedad guatemalteca,
Guatemala : F&G Editores Litografía Nawal Wuj, 2001, 228 pp.
Summary:
An excellent analysis of Guatemala's tortured relationship with its past, with
focus on the background of the conflict, human rights abuses, the project of the
"Comité de Esclarecimiento Histórico" and the legacy of
genocide and the tribunals of terror.
Beristain, Carlos. "The Value of Memory." On the CSVR
website . Cabrera, Roberto. "Should we remember?
Recovering Historical Memory in Guatemala."
On
the CSVR website . www.incore.ulst.ac.uk/home/publication/ research/dwtp/cabrera.pdf
Robert M. Carmack (Editor), Harvest of Violence: The Maya
Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis (University of Oklahoma Press; 1992)
There
are 10 different case histories all written by different people who are among
the top guatemalan scholars.
Ignacio
Bizarro Ujpán, (James D. Sexton translator and editor) Ignacio: The
Diary of a Maya Indian of Guatemala, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press)
The
story of Ignacio Bizarro Ujpán, a Maya Indian who resides on the shores
of the beautiful Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. The story narrates Ignacio's
life town, and country during the 1980s, a period when many campesinos found themselves
caught between two fires--the insurgency of the guerrillas and the counterinsurgency
of the army. Meanwhile, Ignacio and his fellow townspeople attempted to maintain
as much normalcy in their lives as possible.
Ricardo Falla, Massacres
in the Jungle: Ixcan, Guatemala, 1975-1982, Translated from Masacres de
la Selva (Boulder, Co, Westview, 1994)
Ricardo
Falla, S.J., has done pastoral work with the Communities of Population in Resistance
in the Ixcán since 1987. He is the author of numerous books, including his most
recent one, Massacres of the Ixcán Jungle, which documents the army massacres
of the early 1980s.
Felipe
Gómez Isa, Asier Martínez Bringas, et al. Racismo y genocidio en Guatemala
/[Bilbao] : Universidad de Deusto, Instituto de Derechos Humanos, 2000. 31 p.
Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala
: A History of Race and Nation
Over
the latter half of the twentieth century, the Guatemalan state slaughtered more
than two hundred thousand of its citizens. In the wake of this violence, a vibrant
pan-Mayan movement has emerged, one that is challenging Ladino (non-indigenous)
notions of citizenship and national identity. In The Blood of Guatemala Greg Grandin
locates the origins of this ethnic resurgence within the social processes of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century state formation rather than in the ruins of the national
project of recent decades. Focusing on Mayan elites in the community of Quetzaltenango,
Grandin shows how their efforts to maintain authority over the indigenous population
and secure political power in relation to non-Indians played a crucial role in
the formation of the Guatemalan nation. To explore the close connection between
nationalism, state power, ethnic identity, and political violence, Grandin draws
on sources as diverse as photographs, public rituals, oral testimony, literature,
and a collection of previously untapped documents written during the nineteenth
century. He explains how the cultural anxiety brought about by Guatemala's transition
to coffee capitalism during this period led Mayan patriarchs to develop understandings
of race and nation that were contrary to Ladino notions of assimilation and progress.
This alternative national vision, however, could not take hold in a country plagued
by class and ethnic divisions. In the years prior to the 1954 coup, class conflict
became impossible! e to contain as the elites violently opposed land claims made
by indigenous peasants. This "history of power" reconsiders the way
scholars understand the history of Guatemala and will be relevant to those studying
nation building and indigenous communities across Latin America.
Greg Grandin "History, motive, law,
intent: combining historical and legal methods in understanding Guatemala’s 1981–1983
genocide" in Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, editors, The specter
of genocide : mass murder in historical perspective, New York : Cambridge
University Press, May 2003.
Focusing
on the twentieth century, this collection of essays by leading international experts
offers an up-to-date, comprehensive history and analysis of multiple cases of
genocide and genocidal acts. The book contains studies of the Armenian genocide;
the victims of Stalinist terror; the Holocaust; and Imperial Japan. Contributors
explore colonialism and address the fate of the indigenous peoples in Africa,
North America, and Australia. In addition, extensive coverage of the post-1945
period includes the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, Bali, Cambodia, Ethiopia,
Rwanda, East Timor, and Guatemala
Priscilla
B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths : Confronting State Terror and Atrocity,
(Routledge, Dec. 2000), 304 pp.
A
detailed survey of the twenty major truth commissions established around the world,
with special attention to South Africa, El Salvador, Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala.
Exploring inner workings of these official investigations - the anguish, the injustice,
and the legacy of hate they are meant to absolve - the author finds that victims
are torn between the need to remember and the need to forget.
Thomas Hoepker,
Return of the Maya (photographs by Thomas Hoepker, Magnum) New York
: Henry Holt, 1998, p. xi, 144 p. :
W.
George Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical
Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500-1821 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's
University Press, 1992), 279 pp,.
Thomas Melville,
Through a Glass Darkly: The U.S. Holocaust in Central America (Xlibris
Corporation, 2005), 652 pp
The
stark facts about the genocide of the indigenous Mayans in Guatemala during the
1970's and 1980's have been reported by others, but not in an easily readable
format. Other sources have attempted to spell out the role of the US government
in the genocide, but more in a legal or academic tone. This book tells the longitudinal
story in measured detail and in a personal manner through the life story of Maryknoll
priest Ron Hennessey who worked in El
Petén and later in San Mateo Ixtan.
The book describes Hennessey's conversion from being an unapologetic patriot from
Iowa to a staunch opponent of Ronald Reagan's policies in Central America - policies
that occasionally threatened his life. [Reverand
Ron Hennessey b.11Oct1929, Rowley, Buchanan Co, IA, d.29Apr1999, age 69, of a
heart attack at his sister's home, Waterloo, Black Hawk Co, IA, burial in Maryknoll
Cemetery, Maryknoll, NY. He was ordained in Maryknoll, NY, in 1964, and served
in Central America for 34 years, mostly in Guatemala and El Salvador. ]
Victor
Montejo, Testimony : death of a Guatemalan village, translated by
Victor Perera, (Willimantic, CT : Curbstone
Press, 1987), 113 p.
An
eyewitness account by a Guatemalan primary school teacher, detailing one instance
of violent conflict between the indigenous Mayan people and the army. Written
in clear, direct prose, this account reads like an adventure story while conveying
an historical reality. Victor Montejo is a Jakaltek Maya from the Huehuetenango
in the Northwestern Highlands of Guatemala where he was a school teacher before
coming to the United States. His book of Jakaltek-Maya folk tales and fables,
The Bird Who Cleans the World, is the first such collection published in English.
He is the author of several books, including Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan
Village, and the poetry books, El Kanil: Man of Lightning and Sculpted Stones.
A professor of anthropology at the University of California-Davis, he lives in
California with his wife and children. A film based on this book is now being
developed by Cutting Edge Entertainment. The Spanish language vewrsion was publiched
as Testimonio : muerte de una comunidad indígena en Guatemala, (Guatemala
: Editorial Universitaria, 1993), 105 p.
Victor
Montejo, Voices from Exile : Violence and Survival in Modern Maya History,
(Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), xiv, 287 p.
Victor
Montejo's latest book is an important and brilliant analysis of recent Mayan history
by one of the Mayan people's most significant scholars. It is especially important
because this is an Indigenous voice speaking about Mayan history rather than the
however well-intentioned and scholarly rigorous recent work of non-Mayan Americans
like Drs. Nelson and Warren. Montejo, a Popti Mayan from Jakaltenango in Guatemala's
Western highlands, was both an eyewitness to much recent Mayan history as well
as a US-trained academic.
Loucky, James and Robert Carlsen. Summer 1991.
"Massacre in Santiago Atitlan [Dec. 1990]" Cultural Survival Quarterly.
Nelson,
Craig W. and Kenneth I. Taylor, Witness to Genocide:
The Present Situation of Indians in Guatemala. London: Survival International.
1983
Victor Perera, Unfinished
Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy, Daniel Chauche , Photographer (Berkeley;
CA: Univ. of California , 1993)
Victor
Perera is a native Guatemalan who took the better part of 6 years to write this
book. This book is chock full of great information gathered from hundreds of interviews.
Perera doesn't waste time trying to interpret the events he writes about, instead
he let's the participants and witnesses speak for themselves. He interviews everybody
for this book from wealthy landowners, government officials, military personnel,
catholic and evangelical clergy and mostly the Mayan people who have suffered
from 30 years of civil war. He then fills in the cracks with historical background.
His writing is very precise and specific, his descriptions paint a very vivid
picture of the oppression and genocide that continues to take place. The book
begins with his visits to the garbage dump slums of Guatemala city and proceeds
to other hot spots of violence. The core of the book is those chapters about the
ixil triangle area where as many as one third of the local Mayan population was
killed, disappeared or forced to flee the country. "By telling the stories
of real people, Mayas who cling to their traditional gods, their communal ways
and their brilliant woven clothing, Perera has selected the most effective means
of conveying the astonishing resilience of Mayan culture. "Perera finds that
military terrorism has outlasted the Communist threat; murder and massacre have
become the reflexive response to any disagreement, public or private."
José
Emilio Ordóñez Cifuentes, Rostros de las prácticas
etnocidas en Guatemala , (México, D.F. : Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México ; [Guatemala] : Corte de Constitucionalidad de Guatemala : Procurador
de los Derechos Humanos, 1996, 173 p. ;
Article also in the International
Law Students' Association Journal by a member of CEH. www.nsulaw.nova.edu/student/student_organizations/ILSAJournal/issues/6-2/Perlin%206-2.htm
Ron Theodore Robin, Scandals
and scoundrels : seven cases that shook the academy, (Berkeley : University
of California Press, 2004)
Contents:
Introduction : why do they happen? -- Plagiarism and the demise of gatekeepers
-- The noble lie : "arming America" and the right to bear arms -- "A self of many
possibilities" : Joseph Ellis, the protean historian -- The ghost of Caliban :
Derek Freeman and "the fateful hoaxing of Margaret Mead" -- Violent people
and gentle savages : the Yanomami genocide controversy -- The willful suspension
of disbelief : Rigoberta Menchu and the making of the Mayan holocaust -- Science
fiction : Sokal's hoax and the "linguist left" -- Conclusion : what do they mean?
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: Plagiarism. Impostors
and imposture. Learning and scholarship--Moral and ethical aspects.
Victoria Sanford, Buried secrets :
Truth and human rights in Guatemala, New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Sanford
examines political transformation through ethnographically detailed case studies
of the exhumation of clandestine cemeteries of massacre victims, the excavation
of collective memory, and the reconstruction of community among massacre survivors,
refugees and displaced peoples. She traces political changes from the micro of
political mobilization in relatively unknown rural villages to the macro level
of national political events.. Sanford explores genocidal massacres of the late
1970s and early 1980s (known as La Violencia) in Guatemala from the perspective
of rural Maya survivors. Since 1994, she has conducted research with the Guatemalan
Forensic Anthropology Foundation and collected more than 350 testimonies from
massacre survivors. She examines how the excavation of individual and collective
memory is enacted through the legal process of the exhumation of clandestine cemeteries
and how integration of these memories of genocide of the Maya are critical elements
for national reconciliation and peacebuilding. She studies collective trauma and
healing through the reconstruction of popular memory and truth. Her Dissertation,
"Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala" 2000a. "Buried
Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala," (Doctoral dissertation, Department
of Anthropology, Stanford University) will soon be published as a book. She is
co-author (with the FAFG) of Informe de la Fundación de Antropología
Forense de Guatemala: Cuatro Casos Paradigmaticos Solicitados por La Comisión
para el Escalrecimiento Historico de Guatemala Realizadas en las Comunidades de
Panzós, Belén, Acul y Chel (Guatemala City: FAFG, 2000).
Sanford is in the Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame. http://www.nd.edu/~anthro/Sanford.html
See also:
"Coming to Terms with Genocide in Guatemala:
The Chilling Effect of Army Impunity and Local Prosecution" Presented June
10, 2001 at the 4th Association of Genocide Scholars Conference, University of
Minnesota, Minneapolis
Jean-Marie Simon, Guatemala : Eternal Spring Eternal Tyranny,
(W.W. Norton & Company, 256 pp.
For 20 years Guatemala's
government has been one of the most repressive on earth, yet the least acknowledged
in the Western hemisphere. Jean-Marie Simon spent six years in Guatemala and the
result is a beautiful but disturbing book of a civilization violated. More than
130 full-color photographs. For 20 years Guatemala's government has been one of
the most repressive on earth, yet the least acknowledged in the Western hemisphere.
Jean-Marie Simon spent six years in Guatemala and the result is a beautiful but
disturbing book of a civilization violated. More than 130 full-color photographs.
One has to understand the purpose of this amnesty international book. The sole
intent is to demonstrate the deplorable human rights situation in Guatemala. There
is no intent to present a balanced picture. Basically it is a summarization of
Guatemala in the 1980s a terrible decade for that country. No punches are pulled
here, just page after page of horror upon horror all presented in vivid color.
The photography is wonderful and i can't think of many books about Guatemala with
better photos. They capture the beauty of the land and people and the blatant
tragedy at hand. This book isn't for the squeamish. I first read it as i was preparing
to travel there to study Spanish. This book scared me to death but more than that
it outraged me and i think that was the purpose. Secondly it does educate at a
basic level what has been going on in Guatemala. A good primer about the human
rights atrocities in Guatemala.
Clark
Taylor , (b. 1934). Return of Guatemala's refugees : reweaving the torn
(Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1998) 228 p.
On
February 13, 1982, the Guatemalan army stormed into the remote northern Guatemala
Ixcan village of Santa María Tzejá. The villagers had already fled in terror,
but over the next six days seventeen of them, mostly women and children, were
caught and massacred, animals were slaughtered, and the entire village was burned
to the ground. Twelve years later, utilizing terms of refugee agreements reached
in 1982, villagers from Santa María who had fled to Mexico returned to their homes
and lands to re-create their community with those who had stayed in Guatemala.
Return of Guatemala's Refugees tells the story of that process. In this moving
and provocative book, Clark Taylor describes the experiences of the survivors-both
those who stayed behind in conditions of savage repression and those who fled
to Mexico where they learned to organize and defend their rights. Their struggle
to rebuild is set in the wider drama of efforts by grassroots groups to pressure
the government, economic elites, and army to fulfill peace accords signed in December
of 1996. Focusing on the village of Santa María Tzejá, Taylor defines the challenges
that faced returning refugees and their community. How did the opposing subcultures
of fear (generated among those who stayed in Guatemala) and of education and human
rights (experienced by those who took refuge in Mexico) coexist? Would the flood
of international money sent to settle the refugees and fulfill the peace accords
serve to promote participatory development or new forms of social control? How
did survivors expand the space for democracy firmly grounded in human rights?
How did they get beyond the grief and trauma that remained from the terror of
the early eighties? Finally, the ultimate challenge, how did they work within
conditions of extreme poverty to create a grassroots democracy in a militarized
society?
Contents
Preface Introduction 1. Torn by Terror 2. Reweaving the Pieces: Culture of Fear/Culture
of Learning 3. The Contextual Loom: The Peace Accords, Civil Society, and the
Powerful 4. Clash of Patterns: From Mexico and Guatemala A Pictorial 5. Resources
for Reweaving: The Perils of Development 6. Human Rights: The Color of Life 7.
The Gray of Frozen Grief: Resolving the Trauma of Memory 8. Tearing Still? The
Army in Peacetime 9. Weaving the Future: What Needs to Be Done and How To Get
Involved Appendixes A. U.S. Groups Providing Resources on Guatemala and Support
for the Peace Process B. Chronology of Guatemalan History C. Chronology of the
Guatemalan Peace Process Acronyms Notes Bibliography Index
About
the Author(s) Clark Taylor is Associate Professor of Latin-American Studies in
the College of Public and Community Service, University of Massachusetts at Boston.
He is also chair of the board of the National Coordinating Office on Refugees,
Returnees and Displaced of Guatemala (NCOORD), and was a founding member of Witness
for Peace's Guatemala Committee.
Samuel Totten, "Genocide in Guatemala", Encyclopedia
of Genocide, Israel W. Charny, Editor in Chief; [Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio,
1999, Vol. I; p. 281-282.
Robert H.Trudeau, Guatemalan
Politics. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993.
Benjamin A. Valentino (b. 1971), Final solutions :
mass killing and genocide in the twentieth century, (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell
University Press, 2004).
Contents:
Mass killing and genocide -- The perpetrators and the public -- The strategic
logic of mass killing -- Communist mass killings: the Soviet Union, China, and
Cambodia -- Ethnic mass killings: Nazi Germany, Armenia, and Rwanda -- Counterguerrilla
mass killings: Guatemala and Afghanistan -- Conclusion: Anticipating and preventing
mass killing.
B enjamin
A. Valentino, Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. finds that
ethnic hatreds or discrimination, undemocratic systems of government, and dysfunctions
in society play a much smaller role in mass killing and genocide than is commonly
assumed. He shows that the impetus for mass killing usually originates from a
relatively small group of powerful leaders and is often carried out without the
active support of broader society. Mass killing, in his view, is a brutal political
or military strategy designed to accomplish leaders’ most important objectives,
counter threats to their power, and solve their most difficult problems. In order
to capture the full scope of mass killing during the twentieth century, Valentino
does not limit his analysis to violence directed against ethnic groups, or to
the attempt to destroy victim groups as such, as do most previous studies of genocide.
Rather, he defines mass killing broadly as the intentional killing of a massive
number of noncombatants, using the criteria of 50,000 or more deaths within five
years as a quantitative standard. Final Solutions focuses on three types of mass
killing: communist mass killings like the ones carried out in the Soviet Union,
China, and Cambodia; ethnic genocides as in Armenia, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda;
and “counter-guerrilla” campaigns including the brutal civil war in Guatemala
and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Valentino closes the book by arguing
that attempts to prevent mass killing should focus on disarming and removing from
power the leaders and small groups responsible for instigating and organizing
the killing.
Daniel
Wilkinson, Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting
in Guatemala ( Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 320 pp. . www.silenceonthemountain.com
Silence
on the Mountain is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative
tracing the history of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year internal war, a conflict that
claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, the vast majority of whom died (or were
“disappeared”) at the hands of the U.S.-backed military government. Written by
Daniel Wilkinson, a young human rights worker, the story begins in 1993, when
the author decides to investigate the arson of a coffee plantation’s manor house
by a band of guerrillas. The questions surrounding this incident soon broaden
into a complex mystery whose solution requires Wilkinson to dig up the largely
unwritten history of the country’s recent civil war, following its roots back
to a land reform movement that was derailed by a U.S.-sponsored military coup
in 1954 and to the origins of a plantation system that put Guatemala’s Mayan Indians
to work picking coffee beans for the American and European market.
In 1993,
Wilkinson, a recent Harvard graduate travelling in Guatemala, befriended the heiress
of a coffee plantation there. Her family had abandoned the land in 1983, after
guerrillas burned down the main house. Wilkinson’s frustrated attempts to discover
what prompted the arson became an extensive investigation, and as the author interviewed
a cross section of Guatemalans—from the former defense minister General Gramajo
to eighty-year-old peasant farmers—his friend's plantation emerged as a microcosm
of Guatemala’s hidden and terrible history. The author's style is taut and precise,
but it is the Guatemalans themselves who speak with the greatest eloquence. After
a massacre in the village of Sacuchum, where forty-four peasants had their throats
slit by the Army for allegedly aiding the guerrillas, a witness describes a peasant
pleading for his life before a military official: ‘Please, señor, God does not
permit this,’ he cried, to which the captain replied, ‘Here there is no God! Here
there is only the Devil.’” From The Nation “ [I]n other hands, this might have
resulted in a simplistic polemic; but Wilkinson, who is blessed with not just
considerable courage but also a strong moral compass, seemed determined to understand
how it all played out through real people and real events….[T]he resulting book,
in which he combines the probity of a serious historian with the literary instincts
of a crime writer, winds up peeling back layers of silence and deceit in ways
that are reminiscent of what Marcel Ophuls’s film The Sorrow and the Pity did
for Vichy France.” From The Los Angeles Times “ Wilkinson writes after the manner
of Philip Gourevitch (‘We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With
Our Families’). Gourevitch’s account of the Rwandan genocide asks how a nation
heals from the shared memory of trauma; Wilkinson wants to know where the memories
come from and who fills the silences in the aftermath of a national catastrophe.”
From Publisher’s Weekly “ Written in the vein of a Robert Kaplan travel journal,
this profound book traces the history of Guatemala's 36-year internal struggle
through personal interviews that recount the heart-wrenching stories of plantation
owners, army officials, guerrillas and the wretchedly poor peasants stuck in the
middle. Wilkinson's narrative unfolds gradually, beginning with his quest to unlock
the mysteries of the short-lived 1952 Law of Agrarian Reform, which saw the redistribution
of land to the working class. Daniel Wilkinson is an attorney with Human Rights
Watch in New York. His book, Silence on the Mountain, won the 2003 PEN/Albrand
award for outstanding first nonfiction by an American author.
Reports
Manuel
Jesús Caravantes Pozuelos El delito de genocidio, Guatemala:
1950, 36 p.
Guatemala:
Nunca Maás (4 vols) Infomre poyecto intersiocesano de recuperación
de la memoria histórica, (Guatemala City guateala: Oficina de Derechos
Humans del Arzbipado de Guatemala (ODHAG), 1998 See www.odhag.org.gt
Abridged one volume translation into English Guatemala:
Never Again! Recovery of Historical Memory Project (REMHI): The Offical Report
of the Human Rights Office, Archdiocese of Guatemala (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
1999), 332p.
On April 24, 1998,
Monsignor Juan Gerardi Conedera, presented the Recuperation of Historical Memory
(REHMI) report, which documented torture, kidnappings, massacres and other crimes
against humanity committed largely by the Guatemalan Army during the 1960-1996
armed conflict. Two days later he was bludgeoned to death in the garage of the
parish house of the San Sebastián Church, Guatemala City.
Informe de un genocidio : los refugiados guatemaltecos,
[Report of a Genocide: the Guatemalan Refugees] 2a ed, (Mexico, D.F. : Ediciones
de la Paz, 1983), 82 p.
Minority Rights Group. The Maya of Guatemala.
London: Minority Rights Group International. September 1994.
Minorities
at Risk Project report "Indigenous
People of Guatemala" by Pam Burke 7/17/95 Michelle C. Boomgaard, 9/22/00
Adam Connolly, 06/17/02
Minorities at Risk Project, University of Maryland. Includes a chronology since
1991 and a risk assessement. www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/mar/data/indguat.htm
Decision
of the Spanish Supreme Court concerning the Guatemala Genocide Case. Feb. 25,
2003 . (English)
or Spanish
full text 58 pages, PDF file Tribunal
Supremo
Annual
Remembrance:
February 25
- Día Nacional de la Dignidad de las Víctimas de la Violencia (National
day of Dignity of the Victims of the Violence ) On this
day in 1999, the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) presented it's
report, Guatemala, Memory of Silence finding acts of genocide were committed
between during 1981 and 1982 in four regions of Guatemala.
A Summary
of the report in English can be read online . The full Spanish version is
also online Comisión para Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH). Note
especially the section "Capítulo II: Volumen 3 - GENOCIDIO"
Also read on this website: Resources
on Genocide in Guatemala and News
Monitor on Guatemala 2001-2004
Rio
Negro Massacre Memorial. On March 12, 1995 a memorial was Unveiled in Rabinal,
Baja Verapaz on the 13th anniversary of the 1982 Rio Negro Massacre. On that date,
177 women and children were raped, tortured, mutilated and dumped in a mass grave.
Constructed by the survivors of the Rio Negro massacre as a testimony to the atrocities
committed by the Guatemalan army and civil defense patrollers against their family
members. Built before the 1996 Peace Accord, the steel and cement monument (three
meters thick, four meters wide, five meters high, sunk two meters into the ground)
was built to prevent its destruction. A previous Monument to Truth, unveiled in
April 1994 was destroyed two weeks after it was erected. On March 1, 1995, a second
plaque that was being readied for the March 12 unveiling was destroyed in a Guatemala
City workshop.
Grupo
de Apoyo Mutuo. "Gam Pide cumplimiento de las recomendaciones de la CEH."
1999.
Guatemala:
Personal Testimonies (1982, 20 min icarus film. Produced by Skylight Pictures
Indian
survivors of massacres mounted by the army bear witness to human rights abuses
of General Rios Montt's government. www.frif.com/cat97/f-j/guat.html
Guatemala : Roads of Silence Guatemala [ Caminos del
silencio] (1998, 59 min) In Spanish with English subtitles
Presents a testimony of the daily life of the
thousands of Indians persecuted by the Guatemalan army, of their social organizations,
and of their struggle for dignity and the right to live.
MayanTV
is the first public access television station in Central America as well as the
first in Latin America. http://mayantv.webcrayon.com/
Escuela
Guatemalteca de Communicación (EGCs) mission is to contribute to the empowerment
of the Mayan people through the establishment of their own media outlets.
Dicovering
Dominga Produced and Directed by Patricia Flynn. Website for the July
2003 Episode of POV (Point of View) on PBS television
On
March 13, 1982, Denese Becker was a nine-year-old Maya girl named Dominga living
in the Maya highlands, when the Guatemalan army entered the village of Rio Negro.
By the time the soldiers left, hundreds of people, including 70 women and 107
children, had been massacred and dumped in a mass grave. They became part of the
estimated 4,000 to 5,000 men, women and children killed in the Rio Negro area
by military forces from 1980 to 1983. The Rio Negro villagers had been marked
as "insurgents" for resisting their forced removal to make way for a World Bank-funded
dam. Dominga was one of the unaccountably "lucky" survivors of the massacre at
Rio Negro. Placed in an orphanage, she was adopted two years later by a Baptist
minister and his wife from Iowa. Living in Iowa, Denese Becker was haunted by
memories of her Mayan childhood. A quest for her lost identity in Guatemala turns
into a searing journey of political awakening that reveals a genocidal crime and
the still-unmet cry for justice from the survivors.
Peace
Pledge Union (est.
1934, London) Study
guide on genocide for student, teachers and parents, includes material on past
genocides in NAMIBIA, ARMENIA, UKRAINE, the HOLOCAUST, CAMBODIA, GUATEMALA, RWANDA
and BOSNIA
www.ppu.org.uk/genocide/
Yale University
Website on the Guatemalan Truth Commission : "The Guatemalan Truth Commission
& The US Role"; "An Overview of the Guatemalan Clarifications Commission";
"Guatemala: A History of Violence."
A Human Rights History
of Guatemala. Provides a brief overview of Guatemalan history from
the stand point of human rights; extends through pre-Columbian times, the conquest,
and the present with special emphasis on modern political repression and military
abuses especially of indigenous people; builds a case that the abuse of human
rights in Guatemala is genocide against the indigenous population.
Other
Links on Guatemala provided by Amnesty International . Links compiled in 1998.
Violence
against Returning Refugees (1996). Human Rights Watch report about government's
and military's treatment of people returning from refugee camps.
1997
Human Rights Report: Guatemala. U. S. State Department report on
the human rights situation in Guatemala since the Peace Process.
Organizations
in Guatemala. Hot links to numerous mass organizations in Guatemala,
including popular groups that oppose the military, support indigenous rights,
and protest disappearances.
Guatemala:
State of Impunity. Amnesty International for the period March 1994
to October 1996, examinaing the issue of granting broad amnesty and immunity from
prosecution to the military leaders responsible for the nearly 200,000 murders
in Guatemala.