Its civil war ended six years ago, but Guatemala is still dealing with the aftermath of atrocity, reports Catherine Foley

The church is dim except for the night-lights, which have been placed on top of 33 small wooden coffins. The plain timber boxes are stacked one on top of the other, near the altar in the earthen-floored building. A mourning ceremony to bury the bodies of those exhumed recently from a mass grave is about to begin in the village of Xecotz in the highlands of Guatemala.

All night the singing of friends and relatives, to the accompaniment of two guitars, can be heard. Some of the children are asleep on the benches. The men are dressed in working clothes while the women are dressed in typically colourful embroidered tops with full skirts. The mourners are Mayan, the indigenous people who comprise 65 per cent of Guatemala's population. Although the country's civil war ended six years ago, the Maya are still dealing with its legacy of genocide and human rights abuses.

At dawn, as the mountain-tops become visible, the coffins are carried to the graveyard. A Mayan priest, Nicholas Ramirez, officiates as mourners gather round the ceremonial fire. He swings burning incense and asks the gods to let the spirits of the dead be at peace. The coffins are then lifted by relatives of the dead and placed side by side in the freshly-dug ground.

Pedro Raymundo (44) saw his father and his grandmother being killed. Standing at their graveside, he recalls how his father was killed by a blow to the head from a machete. "The killings got horrible," he says, looking at the clay being shovelled into the grave.

Although hundreds of massacres occurred in the early 1980s during the country's civil war, it is only now that some of the clandestine mass graves are being unearthed and documented. Out of a population of 12 million, 200,000 were killed during the 36-year war. The UN recognises that genocide took place here under the military governments of Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt, with the Maya as the focus.

Forensic scientists are exhuming bodies and getting relatives to identify them from the remains of their clothing. Once the identification is complete, the families can mourn and bury their dead.

The Centre for Forensic Analysis and Applied Sciences is supported in this work by Trócaire, the Irish Catholic Agency for World Development, which has focused its Lenten appeal this year on Guatemala's Mayan people. It is one of its 30 programmes in the country, dealing with such matters as mental health, legal training (to gain ownership of the land) and economic initiatives such as micro-credit schemes. Last year Trócaire spent 669,358 on 10 projects in Guatemala.

Some miles away on another mountainside in the same remote Quiché highlands, Domingo Hernández (34) remembers the raid on his community. He sits on a stool outside one of the houses of Xix, which are perched on a ledge halfway up the mountain.

"Being here is almost like living in a hole," he says. "We want to talk and shout out about what happened and there's nobody here to listen. We want to tell people what happened. Take this message to the people of Ireland.

"Because we have suffered for so many years almost everyone lives with the scar," he explains, remembering the terrible atrocities he saw in the civil war. "My main goal is to see that Guatemala becomes developed."

"We were like rubbish," says Tiburcio Utuy (60), who was tortured and imprisoned for more than a year. In the course of a morning, he tells us his story of capture, beatings, humiliations, starvation and eventual escape.

"We are just simple peasants," he says finally. "Now that we're back in our village we are asking you as foreigners to help us. We want justice for the thousands of indigenous people all over Guatemala who were treated like that and died," he says.

As one of those who survived the scorched earth policy of the 1980s, Utuy has come forward to testify in a court case, which will try the current president of the Guatemalan Congress, Rios Montt, for crimes against humanity. This is one of the legal cases currently being prepared by the Guatemala-based Centre for Legal Action and Human Rights. The aim of this organisation, which is supported by Trócaire and was set up following publication in 1998 of the UN's Truth Commission Report, is to assist massacre survivors in taking cases against the military high command.

"I was taken by surprise in 1997, 1998 and 1999 when the opportunity to speak occurred and they spoke out loudly," says Sally O'Neill, Trócaire's Central America director. "People showed great courage. That was the beginning of getting the truth out. We would give a high priority to where there has been mass human rights abuses. You cannot have reconciliation until the truth is known, and then the victims have to have justice . . . It's not just an issue about a court case. For some people, simply burying their dead is incredibly important. If you don't tackle those problems they erupt and cause more difficulties."

Unlike cases of genocide in other countries, such as the former Yugoslavia, where the trials are being heard in The Hague's International Court of Justice, this will be the first time in history that war criminals are tried for cases of genocide by the justice system of their own country. O'Neill believes the results of these cases in Guatemala could have important implications for the human rights abuse cases in Cambodia and Rwanda.

An estimated 629 massacres were committed by the military in Guatemala in the early 1980s, according to the UN Truth Commission Report.

"We have all the information and we are confident enough that Rios Montt will stand trial," says Christina Laur, co-ordinator of the Justice and Reconciliation Programme at the Centre for Legal Action and Human Rights.

Faustina Hernández (46) is nervous but determined to tell her story for the first time. Like most women, she doesn't forget to take her apron off for a photograph at the beginning of the interview. Then she begins the story of her escape into the mountains with her four children on the day of the raid, of their hunger, capture, imprisonment and humiliation by the prison guards. Only once does she wipe a tear away, at the memory of the death of two of her children when they were in hiding.

There's a sense of relief as she comes to the end: "At last we were left free. I came back here, picked up some pieces of timber and built a house and started a life again. That's my story. Make sure this doesn't happen again. I'm old, I'm about to die, but nobody should have to suffer that," she says.

A peace agreement was signed in 1996, but despite its stated aims and objectives, the Mayan people are still the poorest in Guatemala, with poor health, few rights, high illiteracy rates, few land titles for fields they have farmed for generations and poor representation at government level.

Before we leave, Juan Tojin Chivalam (56), a resident of the same community, whose wife and family were burned in their home by the military in 1981, explains that Mayans are "nervous in case there will be some kind of repression for giving witness in court", but he is determined to give testimony for the sake of his family and his brother's family who were killed.

"We are ready and able to forgive the soldiers and we are going to forgive because we know from that time that they were also terrified," he says. "We have already forgiven in our hearts those who did it. That's why we are willing to forgive the actual soldiers but not those who ordered the killings. That is why we choose not to go after the military, the soldiers, but the two top men."

"It's been very difficult up to now to prove cases of genocide," says Sally O'Neill. However, publication of the peace agreement has changed the landscape somewhat, she believes, and "made the situation less tense". Before 1996 "any development work was considered subversive".

This is Trócaire's 30th Lenten campaign. This year, more than 1.2 million of its boxes have been distributed through churches, schools and households in Ireland, featuring the faces of Mayan children. Last year more than €10 million was raised.

Further west, near the shores of the scenic Lake Atitlan, a community is dealing with the fallout from a natural disaster. The surviving members of 78 families, who were living in a gorge where one of the country's worst mud-slides killed 35 people last September, are housed temporarily on a piece of land some distance away.

The walls of their broken homes are still there, along with the detritus of their lives: odd shoes, buckets, an upturned bed-frame. Three crosses commemorate people who were never found. It's a lonely, eerie sight.

Petrona Castro, a mother of seven children aged between seven and 21, stands in the doorway of a temporary dwelling. With her arms folded she talks about the mud-slides.

"We lost all our belongings. We had time to grab all the children and run," she says. "Now, there are only eight taps here and there are too many people. It's really hard to manage."

"What is Ireland like?" she asks. "Is it only Guatemala who is left working in the fields?"

The peace agreement, according to Tom Koenigs, the UN's chief of mission in Guatemala, is intended to be "a vision of the future of the country from a militarised society onwards to a modern economic social and multicultural state". But with the country's wealth in the hands of a small minority, he is worried that the elite doesn't have an interest in issues such as state education "because they all send their children to private schools".

"It is not understood that tax is an instrument to equalise and create social justice," he says. "The idea that taxes should be paid by the rich and spent on the poor is openly fought.

"People are afraid of the military and they have good reason. The military are not trained to be civilian police." He cites revolts in jail and cases of "sadism and barbarism which cannot be described. It's appalling. We can only denounce. Our position to intervene is very limited. We try to do what's possible with this government."

As well as funding rural development, Trócaire has committed itself to supporting the Maya people in their campaign for justice. Sally O'Neill believes the injustices they suffered "will erupt unless they are tackled".

It is the hope of the Maya that their testimonies will right the wrongs and help ensure the human rights abuses they suffered won't happen again.

Trócaire's website is www.trocaire, or telephone 1850 408 408 for information or to make a donation