Cristobal Osorio Sanchez, a Mayan-Achi Guatemalan human rights activist, will be coming to the Portland Campus Center on Monday, Sept. 17, at 7 p.m.
Osorio is a survivor of the massacres committed against the Rio Negro village in 1982 by the Guatemalan army in an attempt to clear the way for the Chixoy Dam, a $300 million project funded by the World Bank. Citizens that refused to leave their ancestral land were systematically slaughtered, a campaign described by a UN Truth Commission as genocide. Osorio lost 22 family members, including his wife and infant child.
The Maya-Achi community is now seeking reparations from the Guatemalan government, as well as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. In addition to the lives lost, the community was forced to surrender 3,556 acres of cropland. They were given 316 acres of unarable land in exchange.