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April 11, 2022
On the occasion of the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Cooperative Unión Maya Itzá, the young leaders of the Mesoamerican School of Leadership and the Network of Community Communicators of ACOFOP «Red Compa» organized on April 6, 2022, the «First Film Festival» in the history of the UMI, as the community is known in the region.
The objective of the festival is to remember and resignify the collective history and memory of the returned communities, as well as to show the work of audiovisual production by community youth that responds to their concern about the loss of cultural identity, collective memory, and the use of the indigenous languages of their mothers, fathers, and grandparents.
«We want to carry out these projections also as a gift for them, recognizing the need to talk about our history so that the new generations do not forget everything that our families lived for us to be here» comments the young Edvin Velásquez, one of the promoters of this initiative.
“We are going to have a presentation that is based on the internal armed conflict. As we well know, we are celebrating 27 years of our return. For us it is a joy to have come here to this community, we see the personal and collective development that we have had. However, there is something to remember: the sacrifice that our parents made, as many of you went through that situation of the internal armed conflict and we are here to remember it” were the words of the young Andrés Bonifacio Bartolo Díaz in the presentation of the event.
The Unión Maya Itzá, La Lucha, and La Técnica cooperatives of the National Park Sierra del Lacandón within the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Petén, northern Guatemala, and which are part of the Association of Forest Communities of Peten ACOFOP, are communities founded by “returned” people. His story is linked to the armed conflict, the exile in Mexico, and their return after the Peace Accords in Guatemala.
“Our people came from other departments [of Guatemala] fleeing the conflict and looking for land to farm and live on. Then the conflict caught them up and they left for refuge in Mexico, where many young people like myself were born. Later, we returned [to Petén] in 1995 with the hope of starting over here in the forest where we grew up and we cannot imagine living without it” says Carolina Chaman Choc, a young leader of the UMI.
“It is a message in the same way for the young people and children who are here today, they do not know the reality of what happened in that decade of the eighties, however, that sadness lives in our hearts but today we are celebrating and we are happy to have arrived in this community and to have a place where we can live and where we can work” closed “Boni”, on behalf of the group of young people.
In addition to the acclaimed Guatemalan film «La Llorona» by director Jayro Bustamante, videos were shown about the different activities carried out by young people in the framework of International Mother Language Day on February 21, 2022. See the message on the video of the young people and the conversation about the linguistic diversity of the Sierra del Lacandón National Park in Petén, Guatemala. (In Spanish).
Photographs by Nazario Tiul (Red Compa / ACOFOP)
