Guatemala remembers conflict victims as new battles ignite over resources
Guatemala remembers conflict victims as new battles ignite over resources
Indigenous Guatemalans once again find themselves battling the government and multinationals over land and water rights
Mark Tran in Rabinal
theguardian.com, Thursday 24 October 2013 02.00 EDT
Hundreds of photographs lining a cemetery wall by a main road serve as a daily reminder of the massacres carried out by the military in this central Guatemalan town. Inside there are long lists of the dead as well as memorials representing the communities affected.
The killings in Rabinal may have taken place decades ago, in the early 1980s, but the wounds remain raw, not least for Mario Chen. His mother, Martina Rojas, disappeared in 1982, but he received her remains only last month.
"It was in March 1982 when they took her," says Chen as he stands by his mother's tombstone. "On that day, army patrols opened fire without warning. They took my mum by helicopter to the military base in Cobán. Her remains were found in a well. I am still waiting for reparations."
Death came to the town when the Maya Achí farming and fishing community of Río Negro opposed government plans to confiscate indigenous lands and natural resources, specifically water, to be used for the Chixoy hydroelectric dam. The government believes opposition to the dam was conflated with guerrilla activity.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/oct/24/guatemala-battle-resources
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Background: On March 13, 1982, 177 women and children from the village of Rao Negro, Rabinal were tortured, raped, and massacred by the Guatemalan army and army-led civil patrol groups. The terror suffered by the Mayan inhabitants of this village was not isolated. Rao Negro was one of the 440 villages that were razed and destroyed during the Guatemalan government"s counter-insurgency campaign. Jes˙s Tec˙ Osorio survived and witnessed, along with 17 other children, the massacre of his family and fellow villagers when he was 11 years old. All of the 18 children who survived were enslaved as servants in the houses of the patrolmen that had murdered their families and friends. A month earlier, on February 12, 1982, at the nearby village of Xococ, Jes˙s" parents had been murdered along with 73 other residents from Rio Negro.
It is estimated that at least 5,000 Mayans in the Rabinal area alone who were massacred in the 1981-1982 campaign of terror. The governments of Efrain Rios Montt and Romeo Lucas Garcaa supervised and directed the army"s genocidal campaigns. The Guatemalan army not only perpetrated the massacres, it also forced "civil patrollers" (aka PACs or Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil) to enlist and slaughter their neighbors. Yet Rios Montt, Lucas Garcaa, and all other high-ranking officials that participated in the campaign have enjoyed total impunity and still hold high government posts.
The village of Rao Negro, and the area of Rabinal in general, was specifically targeted in the military"s counterinsurgency campaign because it was located in the future Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam basin and the inhabitants of Rao Negro refused to leave their ancestral lands. The World Bank (WB) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) were responsible for the supervision of the compensation and resettlement programs which were never complied with; instead, the WB and the IADB continually financed a project that was not only costing hundreds of millions of dollars, but thousands of lives, directly and indirectly.
https://archive.org/details/witness_1116_E000644
