Source: Al Jazeera

On the morning of March 13, 1982, 10-year-old orphan Jesus Tecu Osorio woke up in his rural Maya Achi village of Rio Negro, Guatemala, with the crushing burden of satisfying the most basic needs of survival for himself and his siblings. A month earlier, his parents, along with 70 other Rio Negro villagers, were killed by Guatemalan soldiers and civil defence patrollers from the neighbouring village of Xococ. 

By the end of that harrowing day, Jesus had witnessed the brutal slaughter of 177 women and children. Jesus was "spared" to serve as a conscripted servant for one of the paramilitary members who massacred his community, including his two-year-old brother who was yanked from his arms, garroted and smashed into rocks as Jesus watched in horror.

In 1982, over 440 men, women and children from Rio Negro were killed, in large part to make way for the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam, a project of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB).

The Rio Negro massacres were among hundreds committed during Guatemala's internal conflict, in which the majority of over 200,000 Guatemalans killed or disappeared by the military regimes were unarmed indigenous Mayan civilians. The United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission concluded that in certain Mayan regions, including the Chixoy Dam area, the Guatemalan government committed genocide.

The Rio Negro massacres were emblematic of the forces that left Guatemalan civilians at the mercy of their entrenched oligarchy and powerful military (which received training in ruthless counter-insurgency techniques at the US Army School of the Americas), and a range of external actors, including wealthy nation governments, multinational corporations and international financial institutions.

Continue Reading