Rights Action
May 11, 2000

After 18 years, Denese Becker — from Algona, Iowa — is going home … to Rio Negro, a small, isolated Mayan village in the department of Baja Verapaz, Guatemala. When she was a 9-year old girl, Denese — then named Dominga Sic Ruiz — was “lucky” to survive the “Rio Negro massacre”. On March 13, 1982 the Guatemalan Army and neighboring civil defense patrollers brutally massacred 177 women, elderly and children, including her parents and other members of her extended family. After the massacre, Dominga and other Rio Negro survivors lived and barely survived in the mountains, on the run from the Army. The elderly and young died first, of hunger and disease. Dominga was whisked from the mountains to safety one night. After spending a year in an orphanage, Dominga was adopted into the home of a family in the US. Since that time, she has lived her life in the US, far removed from, but never forgetting her home village, her community and family. When she recently heard about the process of exhuming mass graves in Guatemala, to dig up the victims of the 1980s massacres, so as to determine cause of death and give proper re-burials to the victims, she began to reach out, to try and reconnect with her community family. She didn’t know where to start. Now, in May 2000, Denese is going to Guatemala to revisit her past, to get to know her life. First, she will visit the orphanage that cared for her. Then she will travel to the municipality of Rabinal, in the department of Baja Verapaz, where, for the first time in 18 years, she will visit with her surviving family members who live in the small community of Pacux, on the edge of the town of Rabinal. After reconnecting with her family, she will then return to Rio Negro, still an isolated village inaccessible by road, in the Baja Versapaz mountains, in the shadow of the Chixoy dam (funded by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, 1975-1985) that caused so much grief for her home community.

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If you would like to know more about Denese’ story, why she is returning to Guatemala and Rio Negro now, what she hopes to find, what are her hopes and concerns, contact: Denese Becker
515-295-2392
becker4@rconnect.com