"Dedication of the Rio Negro Monument"

-By Grahame Russell
March 1995

• March 12, 1995: The Unveiling in Rabinal
• Children Smashed Against the Rocks
• The Guilty Live Free
• Other Massacre Survivors Come Forward
• More Monuments To Be Built...
• ...And More Exhumations To Come
• The Whole Truth Must Be Told

On March 12, in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz a monument of steel and cement was unveiled: three meters thick, four meters wide, five meters high, sunk two meters into the ground! It was the second Monument to Truth constructed by the survivors of the Rio Negro massacre as a testimony to the atrocities committed by the Guatemalan army and civil defense patrollers against their family members on March 13, 1982.

On that date, 177 women and children were raped, tortured, mutilated and dumped in a mass grave.

The first monument to the Rio Negro victims was unveiled in April 1994. Within two weeks it was destroyed. On March 1, 1995, a second plaque that was being readied for the March 12 unveiling was destroyed in a Guatemala City workshop.

Upon hearing this news a Rio Negro survivor said, "We are going to build this monument so big and strong that they'll need a tank to destroy it." The symbolism of destroying monuments that commemorate the lives and names of past massacre victims could not be clearer. The killers don't want the truth told about what they did. Publicly telling the truth is the first and most important step in breaking the wall of impunity.

Family survivors, however, are not using tanks to break the wall of impunity in Guatemala; rather, the wall is beginning to crumble in the face of their demands for the truth.

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March 12, 1995: The Unveiling in Rabinal

The day began with a Mayan ceremony, followed by a Catholic mass, and then speeches from representatives of various sectors of Guatemalan society, including the survivors of the Rio Negro massacre. Local Mayan-Achi family members of massacre victims, together with the survivors of the Rio Negro and other local massacres (there are at least 19 clandestine graves in the municipality of Rabinal alone), gathered for the ceremony. Also present were close to 100 journalists, UN human rights monitors and other foreign observers, including two US government officials.

A Guatemalan human rights worker, survivor of another massacre, wondered aloud to a bystander: "After all the military and economic support that the US government has given the government elites and military, even during the worst years of repression and violence, I wonder what those officials are thinking and feeling?"

Children Smashed Against the Rocks

The monument tells a tale of crimes, impunity, suffering and hope. Above the names of the 70 children killed at Rio Negro, a plaque reads: "Children who were smashed against the rocks." This was the method the soldiers and patrollers used.

The lives of 18 children were spared at the Rio Negro massacre site when the civil defense patrollers, the very men who murdered their parents, brothers and sisters, took the 18 back to Xococ to live in their homes for two years after the massacre. "Diego" (not his real name), one of the 18 children recalls:

"At around 4 p.m. on the afternoon of the massacre, one of the patrollers came to where we were huddled by the pit where they were dumping the bodies and said that he was going to spare my life and take me to live with him. I waited with my baby brother. They grouped 18 of us children together, to take us to live with them in Xococ.

"The patroller told me we had far to walk that night and that I wouldn't be able to carry my brother. I told him that I could, but he said no and forcibly grabbed him away. He tied a rope around the neck of my brother and was carrying him this way, choking him. Then he smashed my brother against the rocks, killing him, and threw him in the pit. I was standing 10 meters away. "Around 5 p.m. we left Pacoxom (site of the massacre). As we were walking I heard some patrollers talking amongst themselves; one had asked 'How many did you kill?' One said 12, another said 15, and a third said 25."

The Guilty Live Free

Building a monument to commemorate the names and lives of their loved ones is already having a cathartic effect on the Rio Negro survivors who, for 13 years, have been too terrified to talk about the past.

Around midday on Sunday, March 12, "Silvia" whose family members were killed at Rio Negro, spoke publicly for the first time about what happened. She told some reporters and human rights workers that, after the massacre, she fled to the mountains and lived in hiding. After two years, she came to live in the community of Pacux with other Rio Negro families.

Almost immediately she was illegally detained in the Rabinal military outpost and gang raped numerous times by the soldiers. "It was common practice that patrollers and soldiers raped almost all the women and girls between the ages of 13 and 16."

A Guatemalan human rights activist, present for the unveiling, said: "If talking in Guatemala about massacres, disappearances and torture has virtually been a taboo subject, even more so has it been taboo to talk about the widespread practice of security forces, patrollers and military commissioners raping women and girls, often just before killing them."

Silvia stopped talking in mid-sentence and pointed at a cattle truck full of men and boys passing by. "Look! Those men in that truck are from the aldea (small village) of Xococ. A lot of them participated in the four Rio Negro massacres."

All through the municipality of Rabinal and in other parts of Guatemala, murderers, rapists and torturers walk free, living under the umbrella of impunity. Victims and survivors of atrocities, like the people of Pacux/Rio Negro, see their murderers and tormentors every day.

Other Massacre Survivors Come Forward

Four days after the unveiling of the Rio Negro monument, a meeting was held in Rabinal. Sixty people attended, including the widows of massacred men and boys from five other aldeas in the municipality of Rabinal. Though the Rio Negro survivors were the first to break the silence in Rabinal and to demand an exhumation, they are hardly the only community to have experienced massacres, replete with mass rapes and torture.

Strengthened by exhumations taking place across Guatemala, these widows are now ready to present their cases to the Public Ministry (comparable to US Attorney General), demanding exhumations and then justice. Public rallies are being planned for the near future to demand that the guilty parties be captured.

More Monuments To Be Built . . .

A four-hour hike up from the site of the Rio Negro monument is the aldea of Plan de Sanitize. July 18, 1982 was the date of the army massacre there. According to a survivor, close to 130 villagers were "beaten, shot, burned and blown up," and then dumped in a series of seven mass graves at the massacre site.

The Guatemalan Forensic Team exhumed these graves in 1994 and is nearing completion of its in-laboratory study of the bones and remains. Once that work is done, the Plan de Sanchez community will bury their dead and erect a monument to remember the names and lives of the victims.

December 6, 1982 marks the date of the Dos Erres massacre (Department of Peten) which left close to 250 dead and dumped in an abandoned well. An Argentine Forensic Team is part way through the difficult exhumation of this grave. Once the exhumation is complete, this community also has plans to build a monument.

. . . And More Exhumations To Come

The community of Cuarto Pueblo, in the north of the Department of Quiche, is preparing for the Guatemalan Forensic Team to set up camp and begin exhuming the shallow graves where hundreds of massacre victims lie. The remains of some can be found above the ground, twisted into roots and plants, left where they fell when they were massacred.

The Whole Truth Must Be Told

For the family survivors and for the victims themselves, it is impossible to underestimate the importance of telling the truth about their past suffering, pain and sense of injustice -- their hate for what happened and for those who were responsible.

It is not simply that justice has not been done for the forced disappearances of close to 45,000 people, the killing of close to 150,000, the torturing, the mass raping, but that people have not even been able to speak about the crimes. The simple, utterly important act of mourning one's dead has led, in the past, to people being killed or tortured themselves.

Meanwhile, the guilty live and walk free.

To properly construct a future of real peace and democracy, the oppressed and poor in Guatemala have to be able to openly and fully express what happened. Their intense and total trauma cannot be repressed and covered up, if one expects a person and a people to recover and lead (somewhat) healthy lives in the future.

If the survivors and victims cannot, at a minimum, openly tell the truth about the past and properly mourn, then their negative psychological and behavioral patterns will repeat themselves. Likewise, the behavior patterns of the guilty will not change either.

The violence and repression that descended upon Rio Negro and other Guatemalan communities did not occur in a vacuum, but rather were the result of efforts to protect a certain status quo, one that benefits certain political, economic and military sectors.

If the crimes and atrocities are not publicly exposed, nationally and internationally, then the decisions, thought patterns and actions of the guilty parties will be effectively justified. Those responsible for human rights atrocities can and may resort to repression and violence once more to protect their notion of what the status quo should be.

Grahame Russell, a Canadian human rights lawyer and development activist, is director of Rights Action, an NGO with offices in the US, Canada and Guatemala. Rights Action supports community human rights and development work in southern Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

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