Support Survivors: Healing from Mayan Genocide

[For a longer version of the excerpted text below, please see my blog at: https://cara-louise-hume.medium.com/genocide-survivors-seek-justice-in-guatemala-f8ec2ae44cc0]

In September I visited communities of Mayan genocide survivors in Guatemala as part of a delegation with an NGO. I learned of unspeakable torture, murder, and destruction that the Guatemalan military inflicted on hundreds of indigenous Guatemalan villages in the 1970s and 1980s. I listened to Kaqchikel and Achí women recount excruciating memories of watching paramilitary death squads murder their husbands, sisters, and parents on the very same land where we sat. They spoke of fleeing to the forest to survive with no food and shelter and of dodging bombs. They recounted watching in hiding as fires swallowed their villages, homes, crops, livestock, and pets.

These survivors are part of a coalition called the Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR), a Guatemala-based NGO founded by survivors of Guatemala’s military campaign against indigenous villages. The purpose of the delegation was to build international solidarity with the AJR. As a delegate, I agreed to share with my community what I learned, and to continue to support the AJR.

Their efforts to continue to bring historical legal cases against the perpetrators, to organize, to adapt strategies, to survive. But their work comes with countless financial burdens. To name a few: transporting witnesses from across the country to the court proceedings; organizing international accompaniers to serve as security measures to deter attacks on human rights defenders; organizing workshops on the court system so the witnesses can understand the trials in which they testify; providing historical memory trainings, medicine, housing, and food for the coalition members

A secondary violence in the aftermath of a genocide is forgetting. State-led forgetting and silence are attempts at erasure. So is a refusal to take accountability and to engage in discussion about healing, justice, or reparations. In this way, memory serves as resistance.

Please consider supporting the AJR to help the organization continue its work to achieve justice for indigenous Guatemalan communities still impacted by and healing from the genocide.