A Guatemalan genocide trial echoes among South Florida's Ixil Maya
WLRN 91.3 FM | By Tim Padgett
Published May 1, 2024 at 6:00 AM EDT
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Indigenous Defiance: Ixil Maya women in 2014, in the western Guatemalan town of Nebaj, carry the coffin of an exhumed villager, killed during a military massacre there in 1982, to a new burial site.
A genocide trial has been underway in Guatemala since April 5 — and although Pedro Brito Matom says it's too dangerous now for him to attend it, he takes consolation in knowing he helped bring the historic case to court.
Brito, who lives in Lake Worth Beach, is an indigenous Ixil Maya from the town of Nebaj in Guatemala’s western highlands. He was four years old in April of 1982, during the worst days of Guatemala's 36-year-long civil war, when he says soldiers came to his family’s house late one night.
They wanted to kill Brito’s father, Miguel, whom Pedro says they falsely accused of being a leftist guerrilla. The father wasn’t there, but Brito's two uncles were. So he says the soldiers murdered them instead. “They slashed their throats with knives, right in front of me,” Brito recalls, his voice softly choking. “I was just a little boy, but I remember watching the blood spill out of my uncles.”
Now 46, Brito still has a cherubic face — but a determined mind. He later defied army threats and located the mass grave where he says soldiers buried his uncles, named Jacinto and Diego Matom. He then decided to help other Ixil Maya exhume murdered relatives and give their survivor testimonies. “Their plan was to exterminate us as a people,” Brito says of the Guatemalan military of that time. “And we wanted it known that one person was most responsible.”
More:
https://www.wlrn.org/americas/2024-05-01/guatemala-indigenous-ixil-maya-genocide-lucas-garcia-florida-lake-worth