Clodoveo Rodriguez has lived his 78 years in his native community of San Rafael Las Flores, Santa Rosa. Since late 2011, his home has literally been fenced-in by the neighboring Escobal silver mine, a joint venture by Tahoe Resources and Goldcorp. Despite pressure from the Canadian mining companies to sell, he refuses to leave his land.
Politically motivated killings apparently by death squads have been growing over the past few years in Central America, and concern in Guatemala is heightened as the new administration has brought back to public office many of the same individuals directly implicated in the State repression and genocide of the 1980s.
A photo essay of the marcher’s culminating protest. Movement leaders have issued a press statement, a “Declaration of the March for Resistance and Dignity, in Defense of the Earth and Territory,” in which they have made the demands for the legalization of community radio, an end to industrial mining and agricultural concessions and violence, and an end to government imposed agrarian debt – reiterations of longstanding grievances of the Indigenous and campesinos in Guatemala
Juan lived in the village of Paraná until August, when for the second time in six months the private security forces of an international sugar company reduced his home to ashes and tilled his crops under to plant sugarcane. The Polochic Valley is now full of farmers, surrounded by a sea of sugarcane, who can’t afford to feed their children sugar. This snapshot is a telling example of what hunger and poverty look like today –according to the FAO, three-fourths of the people who experience food insecurity live in rural farming areas, –and the most recent round of dispossession in the Polochic dramatically illustrates the larger pattern of how small farmers become landless laborers.
Amid the current wave of emblematic cases for past state abuses in Guatemala is a lesser-known first: the first accusation against guerrilla leaders to be brought before the Guatemalan justice system, this one for the massacre of 22 people in the mountainside hamlet of El Aguacate by members of the Revolutionary Organization of Armed Peoples (ORPA) in November 1988. The question is, who is this campaign for justice supposed to be serving?
Anti-mining sentiments flared up again in Guatemala after the new right-wing president signed a “voluntary agreement” on Jan. 27 with the extractive industries business association to increase royalties paid by the companies. However, environmentalists, universities and local communities opposed the agreement, arguing that the debate must take into account questions such as natural resources, the environment, the development of local communities, and what real benefits the industry brings to the country.
The official Guatemalan government records of the counterinsurgency operation Plan Sofia prove the criminal responsibility of senior government and military officials in the country’s genocide by detailing how the chain of command functioned during the war, says National Security Archive senior analyst Kate Doyle.
Otto Perez Molina, a former general who was in charge of the Nebaj, Quiche military base during Guatemala’s genocide from mid-1982 to mid-1983, has won the presidency.
Last week, the Guatemalan government of Álvaro Colom formally apologized to the family of former president Jacobo Árbenz who was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup in 1954 and later died in exile in Mexico. […]
On July 7, 2010, Diodora Hernandez, a staunch anti-mining activist, was shot point-blank on the right eye outside her home in the small community of San José Nueva Esperanza – only a few meters from a fence that delimits Goldcorp’s Marlin Mine. One year after her miraculous recuperation, Diodora’s anti-mining stance and activism remains as steadfast as ever.
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