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Center for Advanced Genocide Research


Keynote and Roundtable / Presentación y mesa redonda

 

Keynote/Presentación: Rosalina Tuyuc, CONAVIGUA (Coordinadora Nacional de Viudas de Guatemala / National Association of Guatemalan Widows), Guatemala

Roundtable/Mesa redonda: Sobrevivientes y refugiados del genocidio guatemalateco (Survivors and Refugees of the Guatemalan Genocide)

Rosalina Tuyuc

Dr. Marvyn Perez (Los Angeles)

Victoria Sanford (Moderator/Moderadora)

Rosalina Tuyuc is a Mayan human rights activist and the first indigenous woman to be elected to Guatemalan Congress. Her father and husband were forcibly disappeared during the genocide and believed to be murdered. She founded the National Association of Guatemalan Widows (CONAVIGUA), which is a leading human rights organization that focuses on peaceful resistance, equality for women and fighting impunity.

Dr. Marvyn Perez is a Mayan activist. He and 15 other high school students were kidnapped, interrogated by both civilian and military police and tortured for two weeks, all for simply asking Guatemalan officials for more teachers and school supplies. Though Perez and others were eventually released, some of those students have never been found again. Perez continues to this day to search for the men who interrogated and tortured him. Dr. Perez received his Western medical training from Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla), one of the oldest medical schools in Mexico, and has practiced as a physician in a variety of clinical settings in Mexico and Guatemala. He is a graduate of Yo San University’s MATCM program.

Victoria Sanford is professor and chair of anthropology and founding director of the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Lehman College.  She holds a doctorate in Anthropology from Stanford University where she studied International Human Rights Law and Immigration Law at Stanford Law School. She is the author of Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (2003), Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (2003), Guatemala: Del Genocidio al Feminicidio (2008), La Masacre de Panzos: Etnicidad, Tierra y Violencia en Guatemala (2009), and co-author of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation’s report to the Commission for Historical Clarification (the Guatemalan truth commission). She is co-editor (with Katerina Stefatos and Cecilia Salvi) of The State and Gender Violence (2016). In August of 2012, she served as an invited expert witness on the Guatemalan genocide before Judge Santiago Pedraz in the Spanish National Court’s international genocide case against the Guatemalan generals.