Putting human rights on the screen

"Our history is a living history, that has throbbed, withstood and survived many centuries of sacrifice… The peoples of Guatemala will mobilise and will be aware of their strength in building up a worthy future."

WHEN the indigenous Mayan human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú accepted her Nobel Peace prize with these words in 1992, her achievements defending the rights of Guatemala’s Mayan people will have been known to many in Europe and North America thanks to director Pamela Yates’ devastating 1983 documentary When the Mountains Tremble. The film documented the struggle of indigenous Mayans in the face of the Guatemalan military’s 1982 'scorched earth' campaign in which 200,000 Mayan people were killed or ‘disappeared’.

Widely televised in the US, When the Mountains Tremble, along with its sequel, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, cast a stark light on a devastating conflict that had been largely invisible to the Western world, and underlined Western complicity in the atrocities taking place in the Central American republic.