The People Behind "Granito: How to Nail a Dictator" from Skylight Pictures on Vimeo.
Pamela Yates
Pamela Yates, who serves as both filmmaker and narrator in Granito, is a human rights filmmaker and co-founder of Skylight Pictures, a company dedicated to creating films and advanced digital media that advance awareness of human rights and the quest for justice by implementing multi-year outreach campaigns designed to engage, educate and activate social change. As part of that work, Yates is currently developing a companion transmedia project, Granito: Every Memory Matters.
Almudena Bernabeu
Almudena Bernabeu leads the Center for Justice and Accountability's Latin America program, and is currently the vice president of the Spanish Human Rights Association in Madrid. She became the lead lawyer in the Guatemalan genocide case in 2006 before the Spanish National Court. As international attorney for the Center for Justice and Accountability, she is also leading the legal team prosecuting senior Salvadoran military officials for the infamous massacre of Jesuit priests in 1989.
Antonio Caba
Antonio Caba is a survivor of the 1982 Ilom massacre. He was 11 years old when his village was attacked. Caba now works to bring justice to his community, and to protect future generations from the atrocities he has suffered. He served on the steering committee of the Association for Justice and Reconciliation, a Guatemalan human rights organization that brought the legal complaint against Ríos Montt for genocide in the Guatemalan courts in 1999. In 2008, Caba traveled to Madrid to testify on behalf of his community at the Spanish National Court in the Guatemalan genocide case. He is now on the board of directors of the Center for Human Rights Legal Action in Guatemala City. Caba lives in Ilom with his family.
Kate Doyle
Kate Doyle is a senior analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit organization dedicated to declas- sifying secret U.S. government documents. As director of the organi- zation's Guatemala Project, Doyle was leaked an original copy of Plan Sofia, an explosive document that details the Guatemalan army's scorched earth campaign against the Mayan at the height of the conflict. Since 1992, she has worked with Latin American human rights groups, truth commissions and prosecutors and has testified as an expert witness in numerous criminal cases, including the 2008 trial of Peru's former President Alberto Fujimori.
Alejandra García
Alejandra García's father, Fernando, was disappeared by the military dictatorship in 1984 when she was barely two years old. In response, her mother, Nineth Montenegro, sought out others whose family members had been disappeared and created the Mutual Support Group to search for the disappeared. It became one of the country's most important human rights organizations. As García came of age, she decided to become a lawyer to discover what had happened to her father and bring justice to him. When secret national police archives were discovered in Guatemala City, documents were uncovered that named the perpetrators of her father's disappearance. Armed with this evidence, García went to trial in October 2010: Two former police officers were convicted and their commanders are now charged as well.
Rigoberta Menchú
Rigoberta Menchú is a lifelong human rights leader and the first indigenous woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (which she received in 1992). She appeared as the storyteller in Pamela Yates' film When the Mountains Tremble. Menchú's mother, father and brother were all killed by the army during the era of dictatorial regimes, and in 1981 she was forced to flee the country. In exile she began her international campaign to stop the violence in Guatemala. After the peace accords were signed, Menchú returned home and started the political movement WINAQ that is now working to achieve a more inclusive and democratic Guatemala.
Gustavo Meoñ
Gustavo Meoño was a founding leader of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor--a rebel group that took up arms against the military dictatorship in Guatemala in the early 1970s; he granted Pamela Yates permission to film with the rebels in the highlands in 1982 when she was making When the Mountains Tremble. Meoño survived the conflict in Guatemala but was forced to go into hiding for many years. Later he joined with Rigoberta Menchú, as the director of her foundation. In a remarkable twist of fate he is now the director of the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, or Historic Archives of the National Police, a project preserving and cataloguing the many thousands of police records that were discovered by accident in 2005. In a landmark case, his team's work at the archives led, in 2010, to two former police officers being sentenced to 40 years in prison for the forced disappearance of Alejandra García's father, Fernando García.
Fredy Peccerelli
Fredy Peccerelli is the executive director of the Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala, or Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, (which he first joined in 1995) and leads the team that is excavating the mass graves of Guatemala's generation of disappeared at La Verbena cemetery. Peccerelli's own family was forced to flee Guatemala for the Bronx when Peccerelli was 12, after his father received death threats. He has also led investigations in the former Yugoslavia and testified as an expert witness on genocide before interna- tional tribunals.
Naomi Roht-Arriaza
Naomi Roht-Arriaza worked as a freelance journalist in Guatemala during the 1980s, trying to bring the story of the continued slaughter in Guatemala to the world's attention. After Roht-Arriaza left Guatemala, she became an attorney specializing in international criminal law and transitional justice. She joined Bernabeu's legal team on the Guatemalan genocide case at the Spanish National Court. She is currently a professor at the University of California's Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, which she teaches courses in international human rights law, international criminal law and reparations for past injustices. She authored the book The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights.