The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War by Greg Grandin is based on the belief that the Cold War was more than just a battle of ideologies, nations and political leaders, but a dramatic struggle waged by everyday people whose illuminating stories were buried.
On a historic day, residents from the municipality of Santa Cruz del Quiché – one of Guatemala’s most important hubs and the birthplace of the Maya K’iche’ people – unanimously rejected the exploitation of natural goods and resources, in particular through mining and hydroelectric activities.
In 1981, Pablo Bac, a Mayan Qeqchi man from the community of Chichipate (municipality of El Estor, department of Izabal, Guatemala) was disappeared and killed.
Pablo was defending the rights and well-being of the Mayan Qeqchi people, helping to resist forced evictions by the EXMIBAL nickel mining company, subsidiary of the Canadian nickel mining giant INCO.
The Cerro Blanco gold and silver mine in the southeastern Guatemalan province of Jutiapa, on the border with El Salvador, is under fire from environmentalists in both countries concerned about the threat it poses to the shared Lake Güija and rivers on either side of the border.
On August 31, 2009 a tribunal in Chimaltenango, Guatemala, sentenced former military commissioner Felipe Cusanero Coj to 150 years in prison. Cusanero’s conviction for surreptitiously kidnapping and murdering six Guatemalan citizens in the early 1980s, keeping their whereabouts and fate concealed, marks the first time in Guatemalan history that a court has found a member of the military guilty of a crime against humanity.
Between 2003 and 2004, the National Coordination of Guatemalan Widows (CONAVIGUA) organized 49 exhumations in Comalapa’s former military garrison. This long and arduous process gave way to the retrieval of the remains of 179 wartime victims. Recently CONAVIGUA inaugurated a small memorial chapel in the former military garrison of San Juan Comalapa, as a place to honor the victims of the State-perpetrated genocide. […]
Twenty-some years later, the question remains the same: where are the disappeared? Based on a witness testimony, the Association of Family Members of the Detained-Disappeared of Guatemala (FAMDEGUA in Spanish), along with the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG in Spanish), began a process of exhumation in a possible clandestine mass grave on December 10, 2009.
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It is ironic that while Canada’s Governor General Michaëlle Jean was replacing the white rose to commemorate 24 hours of “peace” in Guatemala inside the country’s Constitutional Palace, 150 National Civil Police agents were outside violently evicting workers from their make-shift homes in the Central Plaza. […]
The dense humidity accumulated by violent Pacific currents, crashes brutally against the peaks of the Panimaquín range along the departments of Sololá and Quetzaltenango. Here, generation after generation, day after day, life goes on amidst the clouds. On October 2005, however, nature roared fiercely and the villagers had no choice but to abandon their ancestral lands.
The war in Guatemala has never ceased. While the Peace Accords signed in 1996 demobilized some combatants and weapons – the killing, raping and torturing continues unabated. In 2009 the homicide rate for Guatemala, with a population of 13 million, is about 8,000 per year. Of these 8,000 murders approximately 10 percent are women and girls. […]
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