Two Qeqchi leaders were shot and killed and over a dozen wounded this week near the site of a shuttered nickel mine in Guatemala. The first shooting took place on Sunday, September 27 on land claimed by the community of Las Nubes, which Compañia Guatemalteca de Niquel (CGN), a subsidiary of Manitoba’s HudBay Minerals, also claims to own. […]
June 22, 2009, was an historic day for the family of Israel Carías Ortiz, and for the people of Guatemala. The Sentencing Tribunal in Zacapa, Guatemala found two men guilty of the 2007 murder of Ortiz and his two sons Ledwin Anilson (age 9) and Ronald Aroldo (age 11). The precedent-setting sentence recognizes Carías was killed because of his leadership in the struggle to reassert legal rights to community land.
When Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was overthrown as a result of a CIA orchestrated coup in June of 1954 because he was pushing land and labor reforms, hopes for economic and social justice, the building blocks for a “Guatemalan Dream,” were crushed.
Walking through the streets of Guatemala City, HIJOS slogans are hard to miss: "Justice for Nueva Linda"; "Trial and Punishment for Military Assassins!" Words demanding an end to impunity remind everyone that 36 years of civil war in Guatemala have not ended in justice or peace. […]
The release of a posthumous video by recently murdered lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg has unleashed the worst political crisis in the current administration. Rosenberg states in the video: “If you are watching this, it is because I was murdered by President Alvaro Colom.” […]
In 1976, a former President of Guatemala signed the first loan accord with the Inter-American Development Bank for the construction of the Pueblo Viejo-Quixal hydroelectric plant. The project included the “flooding of the Chixoy River basin and much of its valley, forcibly disappear[ing] 23 villages, 45 archaeological sites, numerous crop areas and natural resources.” […]
Following a stunning breakthrough in a 25-year-old case of political terror in Guatemala, the National Security Archive today [March 17,2008] is posting declassified U.S. documents about the disappearance of Edgar Fernando García, a student leader and trade union activist captured by Guatemalan security forces in 1984. The documents show that García’s capture was an organized political abduction orchestrated at the highest levels of the Guatemalan government. […]
Before we arrived at his home on January 28, I had been warned that Emeterio was now suffering skin rashes. Last May, he was vibrant and healthy, if not angry about all that his family had lost and suffered. I was not prepared for the person we found waiting for us, in pain, too weak to get up. […]
Each social forum assumes its own character, and Jorge Coronado of the Hemispheric Commission from the Americas Social Forum, identified the Guatemala meeting as "the forum of resistance of the continental people’s movement." Coronado observed that participants debated "some of the most pressing issues that face social movement struggles: free trade agreements, neoliberalism, and the issue of mining, which affects rural and indigenous communities." […]
The Latin American Water Tribunal held its 5th public hearing with the slogan: ‘Hydraulic justice for indigenous lands and territories’. In the first weeks of September, the juryu of the non-state tribunal met in Antigua, Guatemala, to discuss and analyze ten cases in which water issues adversely affected indigenous peoples in Mexico and Central America. […]
Copyright 2003-2018 Upside Down World