PBS's POV 'Discovering Dominga' is a MUST SEE !

[Hoppin_Mad]

I have rarely been so moved by anything on TV. The genocide of 200,000+ Maya in Guatemala had it's birth in the CIA coup of 1954, and reached it's peak under Reagan, who said that the brutal miltary junta of Rios Montt was getting a 'bum rap'.

The website is equally impressive.

Please take the time to learn of this horror, which happened in our lifetimes, in our hemisphere, with our government's involvement.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2003/discoveringdominga/index.html

" On March 13, 1982, Denese Becker was a nine-year-old Maya girl named Dominga living in the Maya highlands, when the Guatemalan army entered the village of Rio Negro. By the time the soldiers left, hundreds of people, including 70 women and 107 children, had been massacred and dumped in a mass grave. They became part of the estimated 4,000 to 5,000 men, women and children killed in the Rio Negro area by military forces from 1980 to 1983. The Rio Negro villagers had been marked as "insurgents" for resisting their forced removal to make way for a World Bank-funded dam.

Dominga was one of the unaccountably "lucky" survivors of the massacre at Rio Negro. Placed in an orphanage, she was adopted two years later by a Baptist minister and his wife from Iowa. Dominga became Denese. Adjusting to her new life in America, she tried to bury the trauma of the massacre and the unspeakable memories so foreign to her Midwestern neighbors. She graduated high school, happily married Iowa native Blane Becker, had children, and became a manicurist.

But Denese never completely forgot her childhood as Dominga, and was haunted by memories of her parents' murder. When she asked one of her adoptive cousins for help to research her past, she discovered she still had family in Guatemala. She decided to return to find them. Once there, she shares bittersweet memories of family and village life with her relatives, and then the story of the killings comes pouring out. Inexorably, Denese is drawn into the ongoing struggle of the surviving Rio Negro community to find justice.

Forming themselves into a Widows and Orphans Committee, the survivors had started to document the massacre and speak out for justice. Though peace accords brought Guatemala's civil war to an uneasy close in 1996, seeking the truth about crimes committed during the war and redress for the victims remained difficult and dangerous. A United Nations Truth Commission found the Guatemalan army responsible for 93 percent of total war crimes, and the killings at Rio Negro were declared a crime of genocide. Yet as Denese discovers, the perpetrators have not been punished, and the military is still powerful. "
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[nothingshocksmeanymore]

1. This is a stunning story

I have read extensively on the subject but didn't know PBS was doing a show on it. I can't figure out when it will replay in my area (Los Angeles) but when it does I will watch it. I have a close friend whose mother ran a foundation for the families that were affected by this until she died in the early 90's. Thanks for the post!