The Guatemalan guerrillas committed the Batzul massacre too?

“When the Mountains Tremble” (1983) is one of the most powerful films on the Guatemalan civil war. It won numerous awards and helped propel Rigoberta Menchu to international audiences. Unfortunately, while the film gets much right, one of the most important stories from the film appears to have been just plain wrong.

A dramatic scene from the 1983 documentary will be corrected to show that the Batzul massacre highlighted in the film was committed not by the military, but by leftist rebels disguised as soldiers.

“We intend to make a correction that will clarify what happened,” Yates said in a statement last month. “It stands as a reminder of the terrible human costs of the violence in 1982-83.”

She said she will also amend a 2011 follow-up documentary, “Granito: How to Nail a Dictator.”

The seventeen men were killed by the Guerrilla Army of the Poor because they had been collaborating with the military. One of the surprising things that I learned was that the 1999 Commission for Historical Clarification had determined that the Batzul massacre had been committed by the EGP yet it took over another decade and David Stoll's investigation to get the matter corrected.

David Stoll, an anthropology professor at Middlebury College who has worked extensively in Guatemala, said that Yates’ original depiction of the Batzul massacre could be attributed to the “fog of war.”

Stoll questioned, though, why it took Yates so long to check the facts and why the footage from Batzul was reused in “Granito” even after the rebels’ responsibility had surfaced.

“People like Pam were not nearly as skeptical of the guerrillas as they should have been,” Stoll said.

Pamela Yates seems to have taken the high road when the contradictory information was brought to her attention a few year's ago (see this Facebook post) but not her followers who seem to owe David and the victims of the guerrilla massacre an apology. They really don't like David because it appears his research makes them uncomfortable and does not conform to their black and white worldview. Pamela has now agreed to change the original film and Granito follow-up to somehow reflect the new details of the guerrilla massacre.

It's unfortunate that the correction took so long and that of all the massacres committed during the conflict, overwhelmingly by the military, they had to get this one so wrong. It will but the news should not take away from the fact that the military and its allies committed the vast majority of human rights violations, including massacres, between 1960-1996. In many ways, the news is similar to Stoll's investigation of Menchu. Her story was mostly correct but a number of irregularities has undermined the book's authenticity (at least for some).

Information about the Batzul massacre comes shortly after a former ORPA commander was convicted and sentenced to 90 years in prison on the charges of homicide and crimes against humanity.