This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Rabinal Achi stages a trial, not a battle, and its four acts move through accusation, capture, judgment and execution rather than through open combat. The drama's antagonist, Kiche Achi, a prince from a rival Maya polity, stands accused of destroying four of Rabinal's cities and attempting to abduct its children, a crime the play treats as a fundamental violation of Maya law rather than an ordinary act of war. Captured by the warriors of Rabinal, he is tried, found guilty, and, in a striking gesture the performance dwells on rather than rushes past, granted one final dance before his execution is carried out, a ritual courtesy extended even to a condemned enemy.
The performance is staged each year on January 25, the feast of Saint Paul and Rabinal's own patron saint day, organized by the town's cofradias, lay Catholic brotherhoods that manage the community's religious calendar more broadly. Masked dancers move in the deliberately cyclical patterns the tradition associates with the passage between life and death, accompanied by wooden trumpets and drums, in a spectacle participants describe not as historical reenactment performed for an audience but as an occasion of direct contact between the living community and the rajawales, the ancestral dead the dancers' masks are understood to represent.