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What's At Stake?Investigate Attacks on Campaigner against Mass Atrocities
During the first week of March, Human Rights First conducted advocacy in Washington, DC, with Guatemalan human rights defenders from the Legal Action Center for Human Rights (CALDH) and other organizations, asking the US government and US Congress to encourage Guatemalan authorities to investigate mass atrocities like those committed in Rio Negro. Guillermo Chen was encouraging testimony from victims who lived through these atrocities.
Chen directs the New Hope Foundation Rio Negro, which is located in the city of Rabinal in central Guatemala. Rabinal was one of the areas worst affected by massacres during the civil war, which killed an estimated 200,000 people throughout the country. The New Hope Foundation provides education and other services to victims and survivors of the mass atrocities.
Guillermo Chen has been very active in encouraging community members to give oral evidence to the court charged with investigating these mass atrocities (el Tribunal de Sentencia de Primera Instancia Penal, Narcoactividad y Delitos contra el Ambiente de Baja Verapaz). In February alone, he recorded fifteen radio appearances appealing for victims of the mass atrocities in Rio Negro to attend and testify at the court hearings.
On March 13, 1982, a Civil Patrol group (PAC) killed 177 civilians, mainly indigenous women and girls, in the area of Rio Negro. On March 5, 2008, victims that Chen's organization works with provided evidence in court about the hundreds of people killed in this massacre. Other victims that the organization works with recently went to Spain to give evidence of the massacres in Rio Negro before the Spanish High Court.
The Guatemalan human rights community fears that the attack against Chen is an attempt to intimidate him, the New Hope Foundation Rio Negro and victims in the region to stop them from providing evidence about past mass atrocities.
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