NISGUA reports that, on October 10, the Guatemalan Congress approved Jimmy Morales’ proposal to extend the state of siege in six departments for another 30 days.
The 30-day state of siege imposes a night-time curfew in the northeastern provinces of Alta Verapaz, El Progreso, Izabal, Peten, Zacapa, and Baja Verapaz, which together make up a drug-trafficking corridor that runs from Honduras to the Mexican border.
Most places under siege in eastern Guatemala are inhabited by Indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’ communities which have faced massacres, and forced disappearances in the past.
Multiple violent evictions of Indigenous communities have already been reported since the state of siege was first declared in September and its impacts have been felt in other communities outside of the designated areas. For example, on October 19, armed military personnel arrived in Santa María Tzejá, in the municipality of Ixcán, Quiché.
Santa María Tzejá was the setting for the book by Beatriz Manz, ‘Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope‘, itself a deeply engaged and moving account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s.
Festivales Solidarios, who did the infographic above, is a great new resource, a collective working on historic memory, defence of the land, and political prisoners.
Categories: Environment, Genocide, Guatemala, Human Rights, Indigenous peoples, Justice, Land, Military, Mining, Resource Extraction, Solidarity in Action, Violence
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