Forty years after surviving state violence, Maya Achi women return to court to demand justice, challenging a long legacy of impunity for crimes against humanity. Jo-Marie Burt, Paulo Estrada and Keily Colíndres write in NACLA Report about the long struggle that Indigenous women have to endure to find justice within a judicial system that cares little for them, especially with regard to confronting powerful men.

Benedicto Lucas García, a parachutist trained by France and the United States, was an iconic leader of the Guatemalan counterinsurgency. Decades after the horror, as some of the remaining Maya Ixil victims made the trek from the mountains of Quiché to Guatemala City to demand accountability for when Benedicto’s troops razed their villages, they found a justice system in ruins. The old retired general was about to launch his last counteroffensive in a trial collapsing from within.