December 11, 2008, Santa Fe, New Mexico: Advocacy Project Peace Fellow Heidi McKinnon, who recently returned from Guatemala, was interviewed this week on Santa Fe Radio Café, a local radio show broadcast in New Mexico.
Ms McKinnon just returned from Rabinal, Guatemala, where she has volunteered since June with the Association for the Integral Development of the Victims of Violence in the Verapaces, Maya Achi (ADIVIMA).
ADIVIMA works with survivors and relatives of those killed in a series of massacres in the early 1980’s, during Guatemala’s long civil war. Many of these people were also displaced from their homes by the World Bank-supported Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam project around the same time.
Ms McKinnon has been working with massacre survivors, helping them to produce a memorial quilt, and working on an economic development program for indigenous villagers displaced by the building of the Chixoy Dam.
“You see the trauma on people’s faces almost every day – I think it just affects every aspect of people’s lives,” Ms McKinnon said in the interview. “I can’t have a conversation with someone without, within two or three sentences, getting to where a family member died, or hearing about why they moved from their village to Rabinal because of some massacre.”
Ms McKinnon said nearly 13,000 people from 28 villages have been displaced by the dam, and now live in poverty.
Ms McKinnon also gave an update on her work this week during a Human Rights Day Lecture hosted by the UN Association of Albuquerque.
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Posted Dec 11th, 2008