Waubonsee Community College

A right to justice, a Witness production ; written and produced by Haim Samuels and Alexandra Posada in collaboration with Jesús Tecú Osorio

eng

videorecording

A right to justice

electronic resource

893212810

a Witness production ; written and produced by Haim Samuels and Alexandra Posada in collaboration with Jesús Tecú Osorio

10

Human rights cases online video

On March 13, 1982, 177 women and children from the village of Río 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. Río Negro was one of the 440 villages that were razed and destroyed during the Guatemalan government's counter-insurgency campaign. Jesus Tecú Osorio, the WITNESS partner who shot the footage in A Right to Justice, 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. Jesus Tecú's story is one of unimaginable pain and injustice, as is the story of the countless victims and survivors that lost a relative from amongst the 5,000 Mayans in the Rabinal area alone who were massacred in the 1981-1982 campaign of terror. The governments of Rios Montt and Lucas García supervised and directed the army's genocidal campaigns. The Guatemalan army not only perpetrated the massacres, it also forced civil patrolmen to enlist and slaughter their fellow villagers. Yet Rios Montt, Lucas García, and all other high-ranking officials that participated in the campaign have enjoyed total impunity and still hold high government posts. The village of Río 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 Río 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

adult