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ÌýIn January 2013, on an early morning in Guatemala City, soldiers with automatic weapons are standing on street corners. A long line of Mayan women and men head into the high court, an institution historically dominated by the interests of a small white elite minority. Just three decades earlier, the ruling elite, with U.S. backing, engineered a coup that would topple a democratically elected government and unleash a dark period of repression and massacres. 200,000 mostly indigenous people were murdered; 45,000 urban artists, intellectuals, and activists disappeared.Ìý

Thirteen years later, the Mayan survivors and activists prevailed: former presidentÌýEfraín Ríos Montt was brought before the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity and Ìýa citizen uprising forced a corrupt president, Otto Perez Molina, to resign.Ìý

This heroic story is the subject ofÌý,Ìýthe third installment in Director Pamela Yates’sÌýThe Resistance SagaÌýtrilogy. Focusing on universal themes of racism, power, corruption, and social justice,Ìý500 YearsÌýtells the story through the eyes of the majority indigenous Mayan population in Guatemala. It highlights how the ongoing struggle for human rights galvanized activists, especially women, to emerge as eloquent, powerful leaders of their community and country.

On November 8,Ìý¹ú²úÊÓƵ NYC presented a screening ofÌý500 YearsÌýand a conversation with the filmmakers and activists about justice in the face of structural racism and how the force of sustained nonviolent resistance can make it possible for right to make might.

PARTICIPANTS

Pamela YatesÌý
Director,Ìý500 Years

Monica Aleman CunninghamÌý
Senior Program Officer, Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD), Ford Foundation

Andrea IxchíuÌý
Mayan activist featured inÌý500 Years