Seniors Alyson McLean and Chris Moore are encouraging students to guzzle beer and devour pizza tonight to benefit Guatemalans recovering from government-sponsored genocide.

McLean and Moore’s motivation to aid Guatemalan villagers stems from a four-week study abroad seminar led by Angelina Godoy, associate professor of Law, Societies and Justice at the UW.

“Most of us find that we cannot cure the world’s problems overnight, but we can hopefully apply our skills to make things a little better somehow, and that [was] really the central premise of the class,” Godoy said.

McLean and Moore’s fundraiser seeks to aid the area of Rabinal, Guatemala, where 20 percent of the largely indigenous population was massacred by government soldiers and paramilitary groups in the 1980s, resulting in the deaths of 200,000 people.

“We talked to a guy who had seen his entire family murdered in front of him,” Moore said.

Guatemala’s woes go far beyond genocide. The Central American country simultaneously endured a 36-year civil war and continues to face poverty, government corruption and high rates of violent crime.

McLean and Moore remember visiting a forensics lab that had recently exhumed a mass grave, the contents of which took up an entire floor of the lab.

“That was day two of our class, so it was very shocking,” McLean said. “They were just stacked on each other and teetering over, and every one had a label on it.”

McLean and Moore later heard stories from the villagers of Rabinal and came into contact with a group known as the Association for the Integral Development of the Victims of Violence in the Verapaces, Maya Achi (ADIVIMA).

ADIVIMA was created by survivors of the genocide; it seeks both to remember the genocide and to punish those who were responsible for it. ADIVIMA has continued its mission despite numerous death threats to members of the group.

A monument bearing the names of those killed in the genocide was built by ADIVIMA, but paramilitaries later destroyed it. McLean and Moore hope to restore the monument with the money they earn at the fundraiser.

“Our first goal is to help rebuild the monument that was torn down because it’s such a source of healing for them,” McLean said. “When we asked them what we can do to help, that was the first thing they wanted.”

McLean and Moore’s advocacy for ADVIMA’s cause is not unusual. Godoy has led four other study abroad programs to Guatemala and will go back again this February. Students in the past were inspired to start the UW Guatemala Project, a group which raised funds for scholarship and also supported non-union workers in Guatemala.

“The class gives people the chance to meet some really amazing individuals and communities who are really struggling very hard for basic human rights that often times some of us in this country take for granted,” Godoy said.

Problems in Guatemala largely began when the United States supported a military coup over the leftist government in 1954. The instability produced by the coup led to the 36-year civil war. It was during the presidency of José Efraín Ríos Montt in the 1980s that the genocide was carried out against largely indigenous populations.

The continued entrenchment of figures such as Ríos Montt in the government has made it hard to find justice for those killed in the 1980s massacres.

“There’s not very much progress being made in terms of actual courtroom cases for those responsible for the genocide,” Godoy said. “Sadly, those people still walk free today.”

However, hope is possible on the front of social justice. McLean and Moore maintain that their project will bring much-needed aid to the largely impoverished community of Rabinal.

“We can make a huge difference with just a little bit of effort,” Moore said.

[Reach reporter at Andrew Doughman at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]