CAMINOS Update - December 2006

    CAMINOS was honored for its ten-year commitment to promoting human rights and social justice in Guatemala at the DJPC Annual Celebration and Global Peace Awards Event held on October 14, 2006. During the past ten years, CAMINOS has sponsored ten human rights accompaniers. The need for organizations like CAMINOS is high, both to provide accompaniment and to educate the general public on the current situation in Guatemala.

  The CAMINOS committee strives to inform others that justice for the victims of the “Scorched Earth Campaign” continues to be compromised because of the deep structural issues of repression and violence that haunt Guatemala . Guatemalans still face the same issues at the root of the violence—poverty, underdevelopment and discrimination against the indigenous majority. These realities motivate CAMINOS members and underscore the importance of their mission.

    Thomas Melville's, the author of Through a Glass Darkly: The U.S. Holocaust in Central America , poignant speech at Awards Night illuminated the painful history of the thirty-six year civil war. Today Guatemala is attempting a reconciliation process that would prove difficult in any society. What is a country to do following a civil war that led to the deaths of more than 200,000 civilians, and the disappearance and torture of tens of thousands of more? How do people move on when a generation is missing?

    Our tenth accompanier, Jordan Buckley, is currently working in Guatemala . He concluded one of his letters to his friends and family with a powerful statement:

“Still today Guatemala 's genocide—one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in the

modern era of the Western hemisphere—has hardly garnered our nation's

sympathy and solidarity or, tragically, even penetrated our consciousness.”