Jesús Tecú Osorio, born in Río Negro, Guatemala in 1971, is a Mayan-Achi human rights activist.
He is one of the few survivors of the Rio Negro Massacre that took place on March 13, 1982. After witnessing the massacre of more than one hundred children and nearly eighty women by members of the Guatemalan army and civil patrols, Jesus and seventeen other children were forced to work as servants for the patrollers who had killed their families.
Jesus lived in captivity for three years until he was freed by his only surviving sister, Laura. In 1992, Jesús Tecú Osorio became one of a handful of witnesses to testify in court against the patrollers who had participated in the brutal murders. For breaking the silence, he was harassed and threatened to death but he carried on and his public denunciations led to the exhumation of mass graves in the municipality of Rabinal.
He is the co-founder of the ADIVIMA Legal Clinic of Rabinal and the Community Museum of Rabinal, and founder of the New Hope Foundation, which provides quality education for children in order to combat intolerance, construct real peace, and improve the quality of life in Rabinal where many survivors of past violence still live in extreme poverty. Jesus Tecu Osorio is author of The Rio Negro Massacres, 2003.
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