Short film Pacoxom 2024 and World Day for International Justice

By: Romi Fischer-Schmidt, New Hope Foundation Cooperant

This short film, titled Pacoxom 2024 was shot during this year’s commemoration of the Rio Negro Massacres at Pacoxom. I created it for the New Hope Foundation (FNE) and for BTS. Special thanks go to Sheny Amarilis and Claudia Iboy for providing the Achí translation.

Screenshot from Pacoxom 2024 short film featuring students and staff from New Hope Foundation

Watch the short film Pacoxom 2024 showing the annual pilgrimage by the New Hope Foundation to commemorate the Rio Negro Massacres

We inaugurated Pacoxom 2024 at an assembly on July 19 to mark the World Day for International Justice (July 17) and the Plan de Sanchez Massacre commemoration (July 18), which was attended by all the FNE students.

Commemoration ceremony at the Fundación Nueva Esperanza

Commemoration ceremony at the New Hope Foundation

In seven short minutes, I visually narrate the pre-dawn journey, first by pickup truck from Rabinal to Chitucan, then onwards on foot for 4 hours to Pacoxom, where the March 13th massacre of 177 women and children from Rio Negro occurred 42 years ago. This was the largest massacre against the surviving community of Rio Negro, who in total commemorate 444 deaths at the day long ceremony. Students in tercero basico and cuarto perito (Canadian equivalent to grades 9 and 10) make the journey together with teaching staff and others from FNE, as well as accompanying BTS Cooperants and Interns, to join hundreds of community members in ceremony and knowledge sharing that continues for 24 hours until sunrise on March 14th.

The film moves from grieving to justice-seeking, turning the heart to the international institutions – funded by public money (largely) from the Global North – to point to the ways in which Canadians are complicit in the crimes committed by the Guatemalan State in the 1980s. It is the institutions we fund and endorse that contributed 2 billion of todays dollars towards the construction of the Chixoy Dam, whose reservoir drowned the Rio Negro village and forcibly displaced its people, along with 12 Indigenous communities along the Chixoy River. The massacre we remember is connected to Guatemalans and Canadians through this channel of funds and endorsement, and it is part of the ongoing solidarity relationship between BTS and the FNE.

The film is trilingual, with text written in English, Spanish, and Maya Achí, the language of Rio Negro and the Achí people who were massacred during the Guatemalan internal armed conflict. These three languages bring together distinct communities, already in relation to the massacres we remember. The space between the superimposed messages documents the evolving imagery of justice, from dawn to dusk, and between communities North and South.

The assembly featured an opening Mayan invocation, testimony from two survivors of the Rio Negro and Buena Vista massacres, Don Jesus and Don Felix from the Rabinal Community Legal Clinic (ABJP), and explorations from various teachers into why we remember as we moved through the four invasions of Iximulew (Guatemala). We also heard from the FNE’s Director, Gloria Gonzalez, on the importance of remembering towards building justice today. Students brought these themes into the contemporary context, speaking to the fourth (neoliberal) invasion affecting Guatemalan communities’ right to water, sang an Achí-translated version of Maix Noj’s Guatemala No Se Vende, and collaborated to create a collective mural based on the prompt: “What needs to be done to have justice?”

Students contribute their ideas to a collective mural

Students contribute their ideas for a more just world to a collective mural

At the assembly, BTS Cooperant, Romi was joined by BTS Intern, Ally to speak to the students about the role and reason behind BTS’ in-country programs, highlighting the ongoing need for international solidarity to respond to international violence and complicity.