How to nail a dictator – keep those videos and pics they might string the noose

How to nail a dictator
By Anna-Claire Bevan – 27 March, 2012 – New Internationalist

‘Ever since I filmed these Generals in 1982, I’ve wanted to see them pay for their crimes,’ says filmmaker Pamela Yates.

Accompanied by a fierce determination to unmask a hidden war, Yates originally went to Guatemala in the 1980s to make a documentary about the fighting between the Guatemalan Army and the leftist guerillas, called Cuando las Montañas Tiemblan (When the Mountains Tremble).

Thirty years later, material from her film, which captures some of the only footage of Guatemala’s 36-year-long civil war, is being used as forensic evidence in an international genocide case against one of its interviewees, former de facto president, Efrain Ríos Montt.

Part political thriller, part memoir, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator is the sequel to Yates’ internationally renowned Cuando las Montañas Tiemblan. Featuring Yates trawling through boxes of 16mm film searching for evidence for lawyers to use against Ríos Montt, and following Nobel Laureate, Rigoberta Menchú, to Spain as she initiates a court case against the war criminals, Granito is a testament to never giving up.

‘For me, Granito is a second chance to help right a terrible wrong,’ says Yates.

From the highlands and cemeteries of Guatemala; to the inner chambers of the Spanish National Court; and to film studios in New York, Granito is a journey of brutality, impunity and hope. It introduces us to undaunted Guatemalans, like Antonio Caba Caba, who never gave up on their quest to uncover the truth about their buried past – despite their own government’s attempts to conceal it.

Caba Caba survived one of the worst massacres of the Guatemalan civil war. He was 11 years old when 250 army officers attacked his rural village, Ilom, at 5am and killed 95 people.

‘They ordered the survivors to dig a grave and made us walk past the bodies and look at them. Some people saw their parents lying dead,’ says Caba Caba. …more