Guatemala

By David Mercer in Americas on May 11th, 2012
Activists say more than 400 villagers from Rio Negro had been killed by the time the dam wall was complete

I meet activist, land evictee and massacre survivor Carlos Chen in front of the Catholic Church in the town of Rabinal. 

A solid man in his late-50s, Carlos shakes my hand gently and suggests we go to his village to discuss filming plans for the following day. 

While walking along a dusty side street we pass a small museum dedicated to the local Maya Achi culture. Poking my head inside one of the rooms a shiver runs down my spine. 

Staring at me are the portraits of hundreds of people murdered during Guatemala's civil war.

Two entire walls are stacked with images of those massacred in Rio Negro, a community that refused to leave their land to make way for the Chixoy hydroelectric dam.

The photographs are taken from government-issued ID cards, and the paper is cracked and yellowing.

By Zeina Awad in Americas on April 30th, 2012
GALLO/GETTY

Two award-winning films - one from Guatemala, the other from Israel - are currently making the film festival rounds.

Though they come from worlds that are thousands of kilometres apart, they raise the same common issue of indigenous peoples’ quest for justice.

Granito: How to Nail a Dictator is American filmmaker Pamela Yates' attempt to revisit the footage she has from the height of Guatemala’s civil war in the 1980s in order to piece together the role of US-funded and trained military leaders in the large-scale massacres of at least 20,000 members of the Mayan community.

Meanwhile, The Law in These Parts, or TLITP, is Israeli filmmaker Ra'anan Alexandowicz's journey into the legal minds of military judges and supreme court justices whose decisions opened the door to Israel's colonisation and its long-term ethnic cleansing policy in the West Bank and Gaza.

The task for the two filmmakers was enormous.

By Lucia Newman in Americas on August 15th, 2011

A few days ago, Mexican authorities captured Osvaldo Garcia Montoya, alias El Compayito, one of the most brutal of the new drug lords and the leader of the Hand with Eyes Cartel that operates in Mexico State and parts of Mexico City.

He is said to have admitted responsibility for killing more than 600 people, most of them rivals who were beheaded and further dismembered.

In fact, he was supposedly planning to kill five members of his own gang who were going to desert, and then post the gruesome murders on the internet, when he was captured.

By Lucia Newman in Americas on August 14th, 2011


It was National Armed Forces Day, a holiday in Guatemala, and I was standing on the field of the Mariscal Sabala Military Base in Guatemala City talking to a high-ranking member of the government as we watched a show of aerial skill put on by the air force and special forces commandos.  

The exhibition began with a large US made Bell UH1H military helicopter, similar to the kind used in the Vietnam War, from which a half dozen or so soldiers jumped out.
By Christopher Ars... in Americas on January 6th, 2011
Indigenous Mayans prepare for a ceremony, asking god for the right to stay on the land they work.

Santa Cruz, Guatemala - The road winds through a steep mountain pass, as our pick-up truck swerves around debris from rockslides on the way to a reclaimed farm in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala.  

We are traveling to a large farm or finca that has been abandoned by absentee German landlords, after the main owner died in the 1970s. The peasants, who used to work for the landlord, now work for themselves. 

Today, families on the Prima Vera farm are performing a Mayan fire ceremony, asking god- or the creator – for the right to stay. 

They recently received an eviction notice, telling them to get off the land that sustains them. 

File 4250

Justino Xllim Telum was born on this farm, but he has no formal rights to the property.

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