Jesús Tecú Osorio's footage from Rabinal, Guatemala

This collection contains video footage shot by Jesús Tecú Osorio, an activist and survivor of the March 13, 1982 massacre in which 177 Mayan-Achi women and children in Río Negro, Rabinal were tortured, raped, and murdered by the Guatemalan army and army-led civil patrol groups. The Guatemalan counter-insurgency campaign razed 440 villages, including Río Negro. It is estimated that at least 5,000 Mayans in the Rabinal area were massacred in 1981-1982. The Guatemalan military’s counterinsurgency campaign targeted Río Negro, and the area of Rabinal in general, because the inhabitants of Río Negro refused to leave their ancestral lands for the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam. The Guatemalan army not only perpetrated the massacres, but also forced "civil patrollers" (called PACs or Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil) to enlist and murder their neighbors. The governments of Efrain Rios Montt and Romeo Lucas García supervised and directed the army's genocidal campaigns. Rios Montt, Lucas García, and all other high-ranking officials who participated in the campaign continued to hold high government posts with impunity.

Jesús Tecú Osorio was 11 years old when he witnessed the massacre of his family and fellow villagers. After the massacre, the patrolmen responsible for the massacre held Osorio and 17 other child survivors captive as servants.

Osorio currently works to expose systematic human rights violations and to ensure that those responsible are brought to justice. Along with widows and other survivors, he helped found organization, ADIVIMA (Asociación para el Desarollo Integral de las Víctimas de la Violencia en las Verapaces, Maya Achí / Association for the Integral Development of the Victims of Violence in the Verapaces, Maya Achi), which works to break Guatemala’s climate of impunity. In 1993, Osorio spearheaded the campaign to exhume mass graves in Rabinal and bring charges against the patrollers responsible for the massacres. In 1996, Osorio won the Reebok Human Rights Award. In 2002, he published his memoir, Memoria de las masacres de Río Negro; recuerdo de mis padres y memoria para mis hijos; Natalie Armstrong translated the memoir into English in 2003 and it was published under the title, The Rio Negro Massacres. Osorio continues to work on ending the economic and social injustices in the Rabinal community by leading 25,000 people in their ongoing campaign for compensation after the government violently displaced them in order to use their land for the Chixoy Hydroelectric Project.