EL PASO — They left their Ixil Maya town deep in the Cuchumatanes mountains of Guatemala just before dawn and without much time to say goodbye.
Francisco Chávez Raymundo, 45, and Gaspar Cobo Corio, 32, had been part of a tight circle of indigenous activists who in the spring of 2013 helped bring a military dictator to trial over the 1982 genocide of the Ixil people, a Mayan ethnic group that became one of the main targets of systematic racism, rape, and forced displacement during the Guatemalan civil war.
But as they continued their work to preserve historical accounts and records of the massacre, and to defend their ancestral lands from the government and the transnational corporations with which it partnered, an authoritarian backlash began to gain momentum. First came the random assaults, then the assassinations.
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