USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will host the international conference “A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala,” at the University of Southern California, Sept. 11-14, 2016. The scholars profiled in this series were each selected to present their research at the conference.

For her presentation at the conference, Morna Macleod will look back on her experiences working in human rights in the final years of the Guatemalan Genocide 30 years ago.

Macleod, currently researcher and lecturer at the State Autonomous University of Morelos in Mexico, was a volunteer and interpreter for the Guatemala Human Rights Commission and Justicia y Paz in Mexico City from 1983-1986. These experiences, while difficult emotionally, gave Macleod a deep understanding of the Guatemalan massacres as they were happening. Now, she has decided to revisit her former work and discuss how the genocide was understood and reported on in the 1980s for her presentation at the USC Shoah Foundation conference.

“Looking at what happened more than thirty years ago with fresh eyes seemed like a really interesting thing to do,” Macleod said.

Macleod will talk about how human rights organizations in the 1980s viewed the genocide, how they talked and wrote about it, and how they thought it intersected with race, gender and ethnicity. She will also discuss how use of the word “genocide” to describe what happened in Guatemala has changed over time.

It is important to continue debating and studying the genocide even as the years go on, Macleod said, because real insight cannot be achieved in just a few years. Over time, scholars can compare different genocides and discover the transnational issues at hand.

"I naively assumed one day there would be justice." 

Reflecting on the progress, or lack of progress, Guatemala has made toward justice for the victims over the past 30 years can be disheartening, Macleod said.

“I naively assumed one day there would be justice. It never crossed my mind that there [still] wouldn’t be,” she said.

Macleod is looking forward to bringing her own perspective of the past to share with the scholars at the conference, many of whom are more focused on the current situation in Guatemala and Guatemalan genocide scholarship than she is.

“What I get out of [the conference] is learning more about how people are working on this now,” she said. “Bringing together these different strands I feel is really exciting.”