Thirty-two years after the Chixoy Dam/Rio Negro massacres in Guatemala, the U.S. government is calling on the World Bank (WB) and Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) to ensure implementation of a $154,000,000 reparations plan for the surviving victims.
On Friday November 22nd, 2013, members of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) returned the skeletal remains of six positively identified male wartime victims to their appropriate families in the Poqomchi’ Mayan hamlet of Pambach, 38 kilometers from Cobán. All six men were taken by the army after a military incursion to the village on June 3rd, 1982, during the de facto government of Efraín Ríos Montt, and were never seen again.
As Guatemalan courts deliberate on whether or not to grant amnesty to former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt for crimes committed during his 1982-1983 “presidency” which he assumed after a military coup, Anselmo Roldán, a massacre survivor from La Libertad, Huehuetenango is traversing the U.S. in search of solidarity for the victims of Guatemala’s armed internal conflict. One of the organizations at the forefront of the struggle for peace and to end impunity has been the Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR), a community group of which Anselmo is the current President.
On September 28, community leader Mynor López was walking by the church in Santa Cruz Barillas, Huehuetenango, when he was suddenly seized by men dressed in civilian clothing, taken in a pickup to a waiting military helicopter, and flown to Guatemala City. The response of the population was both immediate and massive. In communities across the region residents took to the streets in peaceful protest, blockading highways and demanding Mynor’s release.
For the first time, a Canadian mining company will appear in a Canadian court for actions committed overseas. Hudbay Minerals, Inc, will be standing trial for murder, rapes and attacks committed against Indigenous Guatemalans by security personnel working for Hudbay’s subsidiary, Compañía Guatemalteca de Níquel (CGN).
Marvin Castillo, 29, from Chiantla, Huehuetenango, waits in line before registering at the Migration Office in Guatemala City’s La Aurora Airport after having been deported from the United States. Marvin declares: “I already spent four years in Cincinnati from 2003 to 2007, but I got deported. My wife and kids are with my in-laws here in Chiantla. I was held for two months in a Texas detention center this time. The gringos treat us like animals, but I will have to try again at some point as there is no work here, and I did not even finish my primary education.”
Indigenous representatives gathered from across the country on August 9 in a local school in the municipality of Totonicapán demanding that the state honor their rights to self determination. This event, convened by the 48 Cantones of Totonicapán, was one of 25 acts of protest nationwide, including road blockades at strategic points throughout the country marking International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.
In March 2012, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay expressed concern about “reports of an increased use of the military in law-enforcement functions.” She stressed that any such participation should only be in a “police support capacity without diverting resources from the police”; must be “subject to civilian direction and control”; and needed to be “limited in time and scope.” Since then, it appears little has improved.
On Sunday, in a celebration of life, peace and defense of the earth, community members from La Puya joined together beside the central market of San José del Golfo in support of the peaceful struggle for dignity, water and future generations. This gathering was organized shortly after a press release denouncing the murder of Ajau Suret and the most recent intimidation of Oqueli Veliz.
This article is about people suffering, surviving and living in the aftermath of the genocides in Guatemala, and how they keep their sights on truth and justice, beyond the cruelty and oppression that so devastated them. It includes a short story about a tenacious and collective struggle of red ants in Chichipate, Guatemala.
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