Guatemalan Genocide Stories to be Showcased by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation

The Guatemalan Civil War made history, bringing a lot of heartbreak as the government forces of Guatemala executed a genocide against the Mayan people. Today, Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, an institute of visual history and education, interviewed the survivors of the mass killings in an effort to study and share their stories. 

"I saw when they put a bullet in my father's head. My father was left lying there, and the dogs began to eat his brains. ... It was the soldiers who were providing security for the dam," Juan Chen Chen said, sharing his story of his father being killed by Guatemalan soldiers in the Rio Negro massacre in 1980, according to Daily Mail.

Fortunately, Chen was lucky enough to survive the terror event, escaping the turmoil by going to the mountains of Central America with his family. His narrative was just one of the oral histories of the 69-year-old American director's USC Shoah Foundation, who gathered for a complete report about the Guatemala Genocide, from 1960 to 1996.

The survivor's tale will complete the 245,000 tragic stories of people who were murdered, with some instantly gone at the hands of the armed forces and paramilitary gangs. This was the first time that the producer's non-profit organization worked together with Latin America, followed by their effort to collect 52,000 narratives of the Nazi Holocaust, butchery in Armenia (1915-23) and Rwanda (1994) and the Nanking Massacre in China in 1937.

The foundation has already documented about 100 statements from the tragic Guatemala event, and are aiming for at least 500 in total, with the help of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala. They will continue to work until 2016 and are looking forward to complete everything in 2017.

Furthermore, Fredy Peccerelli, director of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation, said: "[the goal is to tell the stories] that nobody wants to know about, without either political or ideological filters." This, too, is to show the past lives of the people during the early days, the war and after the conflict, as reported by The Times of Israel.

Volunteers behind the foundation intentionally went to rural areas to get the side stories of indigenous men like Chen, who outlived the genocide in Rio Negro, Baja Verapaz department, around 110 miles (175 kilometers) north of Guatemala City.

He said the soldiers suddenly appeared to interrogate everyone about the missing equipment of the Chixoy dam. A heated argument then started, which led to seven community leaders butchered, ushering in the horrific happenings in the small town. 

Watch the report of the Guatemalan Genocide by Witness.