Guatemala: Why We Cannot Turn Away
By Xeni Jardin
Source: PBS Newshour
Sunday, May 12, 2013
When the trial of Guatemalan General and former de facto head of state José Efraín Ríos Montt and his then chief of intelligence José Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez began on March 19, 2013, I was in Washington D.C., working with NewsHour correspondent Miles O’Brien on some new science reporting projects in a shared office. The first time I went to Guatemala was around 1989, during the country’s 36-year civil war -- I was a teenager, and the experience was one of the most important and formative of my life. My interest in the peace and justice process following the end of the armed conflict and the lives of the Guatemalan people, has only grown since. So I was happy to learn that Guatemalan independent online media groups were in the courtroom with laptops and modems, live-streaming video and audio of tribunal proceedings.
I tuned in as soon as court opened at 8:30 every morning, Guatemala time. And in our shared D.C. office, over a course of weeks, every day Miles and I worked while listening to audio streaming over the internet from that courtroom far away in Guatemala City. The background audio of our workdays included witness testimonies; defense lawyers yelling at the judges; and elderly Ixil Maya women weeping as they re-told the horrors of being raped, and watching their children, brothers, mothers, and grandfathers be killed.
Both of us were trying to do other work at the time, unrelated to this story. But neither of us could turn away, or turn off the audio, even as the stories grew more graphic, more upsetting, more awful with each witness. Imagine the worst possible thing one human being can do to another. Each testimony was like that, but each in a new and seemingly more horrific way than the last.
During one of my trips to Guatemala in the 2000’s, I produced a documentary series for National Public Radio [2] about the role science and technology played in some interesting stories related to peace and justice, and related to social and economic development for the country’s majority population who are poor and indigenous. Some of the episodes focused on entities such as the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation [3] (FAFG) and the Project for the Recuperation of the Historic Archives of Guatemala’s National Police (AHPN) -- groups that have produced forensic and documentational evidence that became central to the 2013 Rios Montt genocide tribunal.
More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/guatemala-why-we-cannot-turn-away-by-xeni-jardin
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