In the early morning of March 13, 1982, the Guatemalan army and its paramilitary recruits, called Civil Defense Patrols, entered the rural, Maya Achí village of Río Negro, near the town of Rabinal. Only women and children were in the village that morning; the men had fled to the surrounding mountains, believing women and children would not be targeted as suspected guerrillas. Paramilitary soldiers forced an eleven-year-old boy to the ground to watch the brutal massacre of his relatives and neighbors. Soldiers had killed the boy’s parents just one month before, and now they took his two-year-old brother from his arms and smashed his head against a rock. One hundred seventy-seven women and children were slaughtered that day. Over the course of the next year, military and paramilitary forces committed massacres in nineteen of Rabinal’s thirty-eight villages.
The young boy, Jesus Tecu Osorio, like other child survivors of the Río Negro massacre, was forced to live with and work for the very people who killed his relatives. Ten years later, despite receiving death threats, he testified against the paramilitary perpetrators of the massacre. Jesus and other courageous community leaders have refused to let the world forget about what happened in their villages. They founded a community museum commemorating the massacre, the first such memorial in Guatemala, and coordinated the exhumation of mass graves around the Rabinal area. Jesus helped found the Bufete Jurídico Popular, a legal clinic that provides free services in cases of land disputes and human rights violations resulting from the war.
During Guatemala’s civil war, land was taken by force or occupied by civil patrollers when families fled the violence. Today, complicated disputes have arisen as people have returned to claim their land. Other local conflicts stem from civil patrollers living in the same communities as the families of the victims. The Bufete Jurídico Popular serves the indigenous communities of Rabinal in seeking non-violent legal solutions to conflict. The Bufete also helps communal landowners secure the land rights promised by the Peace Accords. The Bufete coordinates exhumations of clandestine cemeteries in the Rabinal area and represents victims in seeking reparations from the government; reports paramilitary threats against human rights defenders; and trains legal promoters to provide human rights and legal information to the communities of Rabinal.
Since its founding in 1999, the Bufete has helped to resolve hundreds of cases brought by community members, including land and family disputes. In the Río Negro massacre case, the Bufete secured the arrest of former paramilitary soldiers and helped survivors to testify against them at the trial. The Bufete will continue to support the communities of Rabinal in their struggle for justice until all perpetrators are held accountable for their crimes.
As one of the organization’s first donors and its largest source of funding, the Fund for Global Human Rights supports Bufete in its work to rebuild the communities of Rabinal and promote the rule of law in rural Baja Verapaz.
