Intern update: From curiosity to connection: Witnessing justice in Rabinal

By: Nitya Ramírez, BTS intern (2025)

I returned from Rabinal a month ago, but in many ways I am still there.

Four months is not a long time in the abstract. But it is long enough to build routines, to learn people’s names, to recognize faces on the street, to be invited carefully and generously into stories that do not belong to you, yet change you anyway. Leaving meant saying goodbye (for now) not just to a place, but to relationships and ways of being that had become part of my everyday life.

A lot of what I learned in Rabinal happened inside the Rabinal Community Legal Clinic (ABJP). The office was small, dimly lit, and often quiet, but I quickly began to understand the work that passed through it carried immense weight. And over time, that small space became one of the most demanding and formative classrooms I had ever been in. I arrived hoping to contribute something useful and I left with a far deeper understanding of Rabinal’s history and the long struggle for justice following Guatemala’s Internal Armed Conflict (IAC).

My days involved reading, constantly. I read legal filings, historical records, expert reports, and news articles tracing the Internal Armed Conflict and its aftermath in Rabinal and the surrounding communities. I read testimonies, many of them difficult to sit with, from families who had lived through forced displacement, forced disappearance, extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, illegal detention, and torture. At times, I also had the opportunity to hear directly from Achi community members about their lives and memories. Being trusted with those stories, even briefly, was one of the many meaningful parts of my experience.

I want to pause here. The violence inflicted during the IAC does not need to be retold for shock value, and this is not my story to dramatise. What feels important to share instead are the people who shaped my time in Rabinal and the careful work that continues.

The work that I was able to learn from was anchored by the lawyer I worked most closely with, Señora María Dolores. A former intern so kindly had given me a few pointers before leaving to go to Rabinal, one of them being that working in the ABJP and building relationships required initiative and that they were definitely not going to form by themselves with out the extra effort. And so, this manifested itself with persistent rounds of “buenos dias” to every single staff present in the morning and a “buenas tardes” to everyone before leaving for the day. In retrospect, this was one of the best pieces of advice I have received.

This decision was guided by something I had been learning before arriving: the value of curiosity. I am naturally curious, but like many people, I had learned to suppress it in the name of politeness and not wanting to make anyone uncomfortable. In the year before coming to Rabinal, I began to understand curiosity differently; not as intrusion but as a form of care and connection when practiced thoughtfully. If someone did not have the time or desire to answer a question, they could say so. Carrying that mindset into the ABJP shaped how I showed up.

On my first day, Señora María Dolores asked me to look for an Acuerdo de Amistad following the Chichupac sentence of 2016. At the time, this sounded like complete gibberish. I spent hours searching online without really knowing what I was looking for, too intimidated to interrupt someone who clearly carried both expertise and enormous responsibility. I went home that first evening with a sinking feeling, wondering if the next four months would be spent in confusion and silence.

The following morning began similarly, that is until she suddenly appeared with a sheet of paper covered in numbers. She explained that these figures represented proposed reparation amounts for different categories of harm, and that we would soon discuss them with another lawyer in the office. I did not know when that meeting would happen, so I studied the paper intensely, trying to understand the numbers and the logic behind them.

The day before, she had spent nearly two hours sitting with me, explaining the broader context of her work and the history of the conflict in Rabinal. She gave me a peritaje (analysis) to read at home, detailing the long-term impacts of violence on the community, and walked me through the legal categories at the centre of the case: forced displacement, forced disappearance, extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, and illegal detention and torture. That conversation became a reference point I returned to again and again.

When the meeting finally happened later that second day, I listened as the two lawyers discussed how to quantify harm without flattening it; how much to ask for in reparations; where negotiation might realistically land; and what the minimum acceptable outcome would be. It was a lengthy meeting, but I remained struck the entire time by the precision and strategy behind every number. It was not abstract law, but instead a precise work to translate immense harm into concrete accountability.

A few times during the conversation, Señora María Dolores asked for my opinion. Caught off guard each time, I prefaced my response by acknowledging how new I was to the context and really how little I knew. Still, to my surprise, some of my thoughts were taken seriously. I left that day deeply energized. I had witnessed justice being constructed in real time, piece by piece.

As trust grew, so did my responsibilities. A large portion of my time in Rabinal was dedicated to research for the Vecinos de Rabinal case, which seeks reparations not only for individual victims but for entire communities affected by the conflict. My role was to help strengthen the legal justification for both monetary reparations and broader state obligations; measures aimed at addressing the long-term consequences of violence in Rabinal and nearby aldeas (rural villages).

This required extensive reading of expert reports and studies specific to Rabinal and Baja Verapaz, as well as detailed victim testimonies. I would draft proposed arguments on specific themes, send them to Señora María Dolores, and later discuss how they might be incorporated into the final submission.

Community reparations were a central part of this case. I sat in on meetings with community leaders who spoke about what they needed most. For example, one of the proposals involved water access. After long conversations, some communities decided that individual artisanal wells were preferable to a single communal system, due to concerns about maintenance and governance. My task was to research how such a measure could be implemented in practice and legally justified. Other collective measures focused on elderly residents in the most rural aldeas, many of them widowed women living in homes of clay and straw that were made vulnerable by the violence that had taken their spouses and support networks decades earlier.

Visiting clients in nearby communities with ABJP lawyer, María Dolores.

The collective aspect of the case also addressed demands for improved healthcare access, infrastructure, education, and formal state recognition of responsibility. One of the most complex proposals involved land restitution and dignified housing for families from La Hacienda, a community that had been entirely displaced and whose homes were completely destroyed during the conflict.

Researching this meant navigating national housing programs, land registries, decades-old ownership disputes, and dense legal language. I often felt lost during this part of the case, but still, some of my favourite moments involved accompanying Señora María Dolores on the back of a pick-up truck to rural aldeas to retrieve key documents.

I can recall clearly how near the end of this work, I was asked to review a handwritten land title from the early 1900s written entirely in cursive, cross-referencing it with a faded typewritten document to verify names and details. At first, it looked like indecipherable scribbles, especially to someone from a generation where sadly, rarely anyone writes anything by hand, let alone legal documents. But by the time I finished, having literally examined every word, I felt unexpectedly proud. It was a tedious but very satisfying task.

My work with the Vecinos de Rabinal case concluded with hours spent uploading more than 500 documents to the portal for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), ensuring every single file was correctly named and indexed. It was painstaking, but it allowed for long stretches of collaboration and conversation with Señora Maria Dolores, another space where trust deepened.

Beyond this case, I also helped research and draft security updates for nine women whose cases were submitted to the IACHR. I also researched proposed legislative initiatives 5920 and 6099, amnesty laws that would essentially exonerate state actors from responsibility for crimes committed during the IAC. Learning that such efforts were still ongoing was unsettling and clarified how fragile progress can be.

One of the most memorable moments of my time in Rabinal was translating during a meeting between Achí women and Impunity Watch. Each woman present was a survivor of sexual violence. What stayed with me was their determination and clarity in their testimonies. They spoke openly despite the normalized stigma and backlash surrounding sexual violence within their community, insisting that their voices mattered, for themselves, and for their daughters and their granddaughters. After the meeting, we shared cookies and conversation. Freed from the formal roles in interview settings, we spoke casually, human to human. Faces and names I had gotten to know through case files became people with laughter and curiosity. It was a warm moment that stays with me.

Living in Rabinal was not always easy. Adjusting to a rural setting, navigating unfamiliar infrastructure, and confronting daily encounters with my two greatest fears—cockroaches and spiders—certainly tested me. Still, I would return without hesitation. Rabinal welcomed me with so much kindness: the daily “buenos días”, the comfort of being recognised and remembered, the generosity of people who were strangers only days before.

When people ask me about my time in Rabinal, I often describe it as the most rewarding and uncomfortable experience of my life, and I mean uncomfortable in the most meaningful sense. It was in moments of uncertainty that I learned the most about myself and about how meaningful solidarity-based work can look. Four months passed quickly, yet they remain among the most fulfilling I can recall. The work I learned alongside the ABJP and its staff was deeply grounding, but so too was life beyond the office. As much as I learned through the legal work, I learned just as much through daily life in Rabinal. I could write thousands of words about the lessons that emerged outside formal spaces, but what matters most is acknowledging the many people who shaped my experience, through friendship and care, and who made both the joyful and difficult moments possible to navigate.

Rabinal did not give me clear answers. Instead, it offered direction; a meaningful way of thinking about community and the kind of work I hope to carry forward, and for that, I would return in a heartbeat.

Beautiful views over Rabinal.