Sunday, 2nd March 2014, saw the Comunidad en Resistencia of ‘La Puya’ celebrate its 2nd anniversary in its struggle for land and dignity against a rapacious mining industry and the Guatemala state. Rachel Small has put together a fine series… Read More ›
Land
Chixoy Dam news
This picture is part of a set of photographs from International Rivers website here. For more than twenty years, communities affected by the Chixoy Dam have demanded reparations for the damages caused by the project, which was built during Guatemala’s… Read More ›
The Thorn Tree Resistance
As Emilie Teresa Smith articulates so well in Sojourners magazine, Gold and silver mines in Guatemala are wreaking havoc on local communities. But the people, using nonviolent Christian action, are fighting back. With regard to this article, she is referring… Read More ›
Gladys Tzul on Indigenous Governance and State Authority in Guatemala
The driving force of the history of Indigenous peoples in Latin America is the struggle for territory. This is something that has been difficult for the traditional academy to comprehend. If we examine peoples’ uprisings throughout history – in the… Read More ›
Two years at ‘La Puya’ protecting land and community
In February of 2012, residents of San José del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc (La Puya), north of Guatemala City, were struggling to obtain information about a reported mining project in their communities, which would affect hundreds of families. Months… Read More ›
Brief Review of 2013
Situation of Human rights defenders The context in Guatemala in 2013 continued being hazardous for human rights’ defenders where, up to October, there were 18 assassinations of human rights defenders and 608 attacks against them, which is almost double the… Read More ›
La Puya – Employees of EXMINGUA-KCA plead guilty to threats against journalists
Guatemala Human Rights Commission (GHRC) reports that Juan José Reyes Carrera y retired Guatemalan Army Lt., Pablo Silas Orozco Cifuentes, were sentenced to two years in prison for “threats and coercion” against independent journalists reporting on local resistance to a… Read More ›
Guatemala’s sugar cane land rush anything but sweet for corn growers
“For the past decade, the corn farmers of this village in southern Guatemala managed to scratch out two harvests of maize a year from the 10 hectares (24.7 acres) of land they rent. But the crop they planted in May… Read More ›
Land Grabs, the Latest Form of Genocide in Guatemala
Leonor Hurtado of the Institute for Food and Development Policy – Food First writes about the genocide being carried out in Guatemala with land and food as the means. “In today’s Guatemala, land and resource control is increasingly in the… Read More ›
This land is Mayan
“Indigenous communities in Guatemala, pushed off the land so biofuels can be cultivated, are struggling to survive – and it’s our fault”. On the 15th March 2011, 800 families from 14 communities in Guatemala’s Polochic Valley were forcibly evicted from… Read More ›