Par: Grace Lile, Posté le: Oct 27 08

Regions: Guatemala

Issues: Impunity, Independence of the judiciary, Mass killings

Tags: documentation, Guatemala, impunity, Mass Killings, Maya Achi, Rio Negro massacre, WITNESS Media Archive

I first became familiar with the stories of Rio Negro and Jesus Tecu Osorio not long after coming to work at WITNESS, five years ago. I watched A Massacre Remembered and A Right To Justice/Derecho a la Justicia, two short advocacy videos using footage shot by Jesus that powerfully call for justice for survivors of the Guatemalan genocide.  I began to learn more as I was cataloging the raw material (the original, unedited footage), watching the video and researching its contents. Immersed in the testimonies and images, the story took hold of me.


“Before the massacre they raped the girls and the women, and then they began to kill them. Some were hanged, others were killed with machetes, and others were killed with guns. In the case of the children, the patrollers went over to where they were all sitting together and would wrap nooses around them necks and drag them by the rope up to the cliff and take them by their feet and hurtle them against the rocks.” - Excerpts from Jesus Tecu Osorio's testimony

Rio Negro was one of many massacres which occurred during a period of extreme and unspeakable brutality during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.  At least 200,000 civilians, a majority of them Maya, were killed by the Guatemalan military and its death squads, called “civil patrollers”, as part of a counter-insurgency campaign.   The UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), Guatemala’s Truth Commission, concluded in its 1999 report that the killings and displacement were nothing short of genocide. (For an in-depth recounting of the Rio Negro story, read this article from NISGUA, the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala.)

WITNESS' Archive holds about 60 hours of footage shot by Jesus beginning in 1996, when he became a WITNESS partner, and another 25 hours of material about Guatemala from several other NGOs. The footage includes testimonies of witnesses and survivors, exhumations of mass graves, protests and advocacy by the community, the first (ever) trial of civil patrollers, the memorials and museum created by survivors, and reburial ceremonies of loved ones finally recovered from the mass graves at Rio Negro and other sites. There is chilling footage of General Benedicto Lucas Garcia, an architect of the genocide, testifying that no abuses on the part of the military occurred.


It’s difficult to describe the cumulative effect the exhumation footage has had on me.   This footage documents the meticulous scientific process of forensic anthropology, recovering remains of the dead so that they can be identified and properly buried and mourned, and also used as evidence in truth commissions and criminal prosecutions. The video is dryly observational, evidentiary. Visually it is often quite static and repetitive, and at the same time of the most private, sacred, and mournful nature imaginable.

One feels horror, hope and heartbreak all at once.

 Violence and impunity continue to rule in Guatemala. To date, none of the “intellectual authors” of the genocide have been brought to justice. 
But there are small signs of hope: in May - twenty-six years after the fact - a Guatemalan court sentenced five former paramilitaries (civil patrollers) for the Rio Negro killings (more about that conviction in this blog post). And in a case first brought to the Spanish Constitutional Court in 1999 by Nobel winner Rigoberta Menchu Tum and others to bring the genocide perpetrators to justice under the rules of universal jurisdiction, Jesus and other survivors gave their testimonies earlier this year. To support evidence for the case, Jesus retrieved some of the footage archived in our collection.

To learn more about Jesus's work and the Rio Negro Massacre, visit Fundacion Nueva Esperanza.


To search for footage in WITNESS' Media Archive, click here.

Grace Lile is WITNESS Media Archive & Distribution Manager