A new UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) report, Women on the Run, reveals why women are fleeing violence in Central America and Mexico and the obstacles they in face in their journey to be safe. Based upon in-depth interviews with 160… Read More ›
Violence
Guatemalan activist murdered after court suspends palm oil company operations
A palm oil company remains at the heart of conflict in northern Guatemala, months after a mass fish die-off. A day after company operations were suspended pending further investigation into the incident, three community leaders were abducted and threatened by… Read More ›
Lynchings and the Politics of Inequality
On May 20th, 2015, a sixteen-year-old girl was captured, beaten and, while bystanders watched passively, burned alive. She died. The brutality of the crime assured that, even from a remote corner of the world, international news outlets would run the… Read More ›
Rising attacks against journalists in Guatemala cause concern for press advocates
In the first six months of 2015 alone, there were 59 documented attacks against journalists in Guatemala, according to a report released last week by the Observatory for Journalists of the Center for Informative Reports about Guatemala (CERIGUA for its… Read More ›
Forensic science in search of the ‘disappeared’
“During Guatemala’s internal armed conflict (1960-1996) almost 200,000 people are thought to have been killed or ‘disappeared’ at the hands of repressive and violent regimes. Those lives matter. Their families’ demands are clear: they want to know what happened to… Read More ›
‘El Eco del Dolor de Mucha Gente (The Echo of Pain of the Many)’
“For over 30 years, members of the Cuevas family have been campaigning for justice for our son and brother Carlos, disappeared in 1984, and our sister-in-law Rosario Godoy de Cuevas and their family, abducted and murdered at the hands of… Read More ›
Dam protests met with repression in Ixil region of Guatemala
This video footage compiled by Guatevision includes a selection of brief clips showing some of the protests and state response. On April 28th, a massive contingent of police was sent into the Ixil triangle in Guatemala to evict a road… Read More ›
Indigenous Campesinos in Guatemala Demand an End to Violent Evictions
Early in the morning on April 17, the international day of the campesino’s struggle, nearly 450 indigenous Q’eqchi’ Mayan families from the Guatemalan departments of Alta Verapaz, Baja Verapaz, and Izabal arrived in the historic centre of Guatemala and began… Read More ›
Reporting on corruption proves deadly in Guatemala
Louisa Reynolds writes in Al Jazeera America of the recent murderous attacks on journalists in Guatemala which left three dead. At the beginning of March, Danilo López, a correspondent for Guatemala’s largest national newspaper, Prensa Libre, and Federico Salazar, a… Read More ›
What’s at Stake in the Border Debate
The vital TomDispatch has a piece by Aviva Chomsky, titled ‘America’s Continuing Border Crisis’ discussing the recent ‘news’ of migrants coming from Central America to the United States. It was only news because the media decided that it was (isn’t… Read More ›