an educational tidbit

after watching tv in my room, i came out to see what my mom was watching. on pbs there was a documentary called discovering dominga which was about a 29-year old guatemalan woman who was adopted and raised in iowa. she went back to guatemala to learn more about her background and it turned out to be a devastating journey. did you know from '80-'83 that 4,000-5,000 men, women, and children were killed in the rio negro area by military forces? they were considered as rebels because they did not want a world-bank funded dam. the rio negro massacre was an act of genocide against this hemisphere’s largest indian majority. a surprising fact was that the u.s. trained the guatemalan military how to use tactics against rebels!

as the story unfolded, it broke my heart to hear how dominga, whose american name is denese, escaped from being killed as a child. she carried her baby sister until she died and buried her under a tree. dominga was on the run for 15 days. that's just the beginning of this horrific story. when denese came back to guatemala, she was reunited with family and learned of what happend to her mother and father. her father was buried in a mass grave and she was able to get bodies exhumed. you could see how the men were killed when the forensic team went through the bodies. they were strangled by rope and slowly choked to death. the government was not happy about that. talk about "digging up old bones". the documentary brought on questions of identity, politics, human rights, and family bonds. denese's story isn't over yet. there's so much to it, you can check it out here. presently, a few of the ppl in the documentary have had their lives threatened and even a priest was killed.

in my happy-go-lucky world it's sobering to hear how only 20 years ago, thousands of men, women, and children were killed trying to protect their land.