Since 1999, Miquel Dewever-Plana photographs his own child’s dream : Lacandons Indians, Hach Winick or « real men » who live in the Chiapas forest, south of Mexico. In the Naha village, he is the witness of change suffered by this microcosm under the pressure of lackland peasants, farmer settlers, tourists and Christian evangelists.

Guatemala has been through a genocide during the 80's. In December 1996, Peace Accords have been signed between the army and the guerrilla. However, this "rich people\'s peace" has given way to another form of violence, the one of the "maras", urban gangs of an ultra violent youth. Thousands of young people, victims of discrimination, war, exploitation, poverty, injustice, and peace accord that left them with no hope for the future, are looking in these gangs for an answer to an unbearable social situation, a challenge to a society that won't give them a worthy life. This phenomenon, born in the poor neighborhoods of Los Angeles inhabited by Central American migrants, has quickly spread...

Rigoberta Menchu’ Tum, is a woman, and an Indian one (Maya). In Guatemala, a racist and male chauvinist country, those are two major facts. In 1981, when she was 22 years old, and refugee in Mexico, she told her story and her people’s one in a book “Me, Rigoberta Menchu’”. For the first time, a testimony was relating the genocide lived by the Maya population in Guatemala. Eleven years later, in 1992, when western world was celebrating the 500-year anniversary of the “discovery of America”, she received the Peace Nobel Prize. Then, she became the voice of the ones who have no voice, and has never stopped to fight in the entire world for the respect of native population.

Guatemala is the Latin American country with the highest number of « forced disappearances » : 45000 people are said to be missing, including a majority of Indians. Most of these disappearances happened at the beginning of the 80 ‘s, at the time of the dictatorship of General Lucas Garcia and General Efrain Rios Montt, but still today, the reality of this aspect of the war is often being questioned. Trials are rare in this country where impunity reigns. After more of 20 years of suffering and misunderstanding, the exhumations allowed the families to go into mourning. Apart from the association members and anthropologists, we mainly met the families and collected their testimonies during...

The Maya people of Guatemala lived a new tragedy in the last decades of the twentieth century: during the cold war, Guatemalan army did the burn earth strategy, eliminating, this way, entire Indian communities. More than 200 000 people were slaughtered, 45 000 people were missing, and 430 Mayas communities were wiped off the map. That was, indisputably, the most tragic conflict of Latin America, and also the most ignored. Peace treaties signed by guerrilla and Guatemalan government December 29th 1996, and the two commissions on truth were the starting point of a long process: finding victims, localising common and mass graves, exhuming corpses, trying and identification, and finally giving...

Peace, where is your victory ? « As they wanted the death, the death for all of us, we rose up in arms and we survived.” Carlos said he was 14; he looked as 10. His khaki sleeveless jacket, too big at the armholes, let see two sickly arms, betraying awkward gestures of a shy childhood. Yet, straight look and firm hand doesn’t shake when he grasped his AR-15, guerrilla’s gun, to adjust it on his shoulder. There was nothing provocative in his attitude, no act of bravado, just a little bit of sadness in the ghost of a smile the time of a picture. Little street urchin of Ixcan’s forests, Carlos paced up and down on path to deliver messages from a column to another. He didn’t spook...

Five years of presence, passions, and patience on Maya’s earth. Miquel Dewever-Plana has chose to put a lot into the fight for the native peoples’ rights, and to put his photography’s passion on Mayas of Guatemala’s cause. He has shared the daily life of those people.