The San Rafael Las Flores mine conflict created something more than a State of Siege in response to residents’ opposition to the exploitation of their lands. It was the starting point for the Government’s trial of a new, secretly launched security strategy that terms movements opposing extraction as threats to national security.
On Monday, June 23 in Guatemala, the Mayan People’s Council, known as CPO, declared a national strike in support of, and in solidarity with, the Mayan people of Guatemala. Local indigenous populations took to the street at 29 different locations all over the country in demand for equality in dignity and rights.
After two years and two months of peacefully blocking the entrance to U.S.-based Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA) El Tambor gold mine, local residents of San Jose del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc were violently evicted by Guatemalan Police forces in order to introduce heavy machinery inside the industrial site. Led by the local women, members of the La Puya resistance prayed and sang until they were faced with tear gas. Numerous locals were injured and detained.
The CPO’s Lolita Chávez pointed out during the press conference that the indigenous communities have acted peacefully and democratically through collective participation in order to build up and strengthen the community organization and resistance in defending their ancestral territories and way of living. “We ask the international community to support the Mayan people of Guatemala in our fight for dignity and our lives,” said Chávez.
Guatemala’s new attorney general, Thelma Esperanza Aldana Hernández, took office Saturday after a selection process fraught with irregularities. Aldana describes herself as “right wing”and was considered the favorite from early on due to her ties to the President Pérez Molina’s Patriot Party and evidence she was backed by one of the Party’s powerful political operatives, raising questions about her independence.
The steps the Guatemalan government is taking to stifle dissent are careful and calculated. Last year the government filed 61 unsubstantiated criminal complaints against human rights defenders, holding some leaders for months on charges ranging from usurpation to terrorism. Most of those targeted were indigenous leaders defending their land from transnational companies that are erecting large-scale mining projects, plantations of sugar cane and palm oil, and hydroelectric dams without the consent of communities.
The URNG must stop being the classic barely-supported left party and become a horizontal political tool for all organized and unorganized sectors of Guatemala who dream of structural changes. The agendas and ancestral knowledge of the indigenous peoples should be incorporated into its speeches and practices. In Guatemala, indigenous peoples, like all other excluded people, live without a State and without rights. The URNG should raise and undertake the urgent task of rebuilding Guatemala.
Free trade agreements have not delivered promised protections to workers, as the case of Guatemalan sweatshop labor illustrates.
La Puya started, as many great movements do, with a single act of civil disobedience. A woman, concerned by the sudden arrival of a gold mining operation in her community, decided to park her car sidewise across a dusty, rural road in order to stop a convoy of massive mining machinery in its tracks. Others quickly joined her, taking a stand in defense of their water supply, farmland, health, and environment.
Gladys Tzul claims to be a direct descendant of Atanasio Tzul. Together with hundreds of others, she belongs to the sixth generation of this lineage that lives in the Paquí canton, in Totonicapán. She experienced a different sense of politics, “a collective and community one, not a liberal one in which an individual citizen exists, represented and protected by the State.” She is one of the few Latin American academics to specialize in analyzing Indigenous governance systems in Guatemala, their power relations, and the struggle that occurs between local forms of government and State authority.
Copyright 2003-2018 Upside Down World