Guatemala can Arévalo improve human rights and corruption issues

Revista de ciencia política (Santiago), 2018

Guatemalan politics were dominated in 2018 by political strife between the Jimmy Morales administration and the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). The most pressing issues in Guatemala continue to be corruption and the weakness of the rule-of-law. The year began with but guarded optimism that CICIG could continue its work despite worries about the President's commitment to democracy, but ended with a constitutional crisis that threatened CICIG's work in Guatemala. With general elections approaching in 2019, democracy in Guatemala hangs in the balance. However, at the end of 2018, the makeup of the election was still in doubt and Guatemala was in a constitutional crisis that has not been resolved.

Critical Studies, 2019

Guatemala is breaking new ground with a series of high-impact war crimes prosecutions. The 2016 Sepur Zarco trial was one such landmark case: it was the first time that Guatemala prosecuted wartime sexual violence, and the first time that a domestic court prosecuted sexual slavery as a crime against humanity. This case also set important precedents in legal and evidentiary practice. Based on my direct observation of the Sepur Zarco case, this paper examines the legal practices that placed the women-survivors, not the defendants, at the forefront of the proceedings, and which proved that the state of Guatemala systematically used sexual violence as a weapon of war against women and as a strategy to control the civilian population. It also examines the evidentiary practices in this case, which allowed not only for a conviction more than 30 years after the crimes, but for a broader understanding of the historical context, including land conflict, that led to the atrocities in Sepur Zarco. By piercing the veil of impunity surrounding wartime atrocities and making visible the faces of the victims-indigenous men and women who have historically been relegated to the margins of Guatemalan society-the Sepur Zarco trial is challenging entrenched narratives of denial that have sustained the power of military officials whose influence continues to shape present-day politics in the Central American nation.

Since the turn of the 21st century, the establishment and subsequent expansion of three (agro)extractive industries-sugarcane, oil palm, and nickel mining-in the Polochic valley lowlands of northern Guatemala has reduced local indigenous Q'eqchi' campesino (peasant) communities' access to farmland. Over the years, campesino groups and their allies have engaged in various forms of political contestation in "defence of territory". In 2015, Chabil Utzaj, the sugarcane company, ceased operations following a second mass occupation of its plantations. As a result, over 800 campesino households now each have access to around 3.5 ha of farmland. In this dissertation, I employ an extended livelihoods approach consisting of archival research, oral histories, key informant interviews, and household surveys grounded in agrarian political economy to explore how the struggle for defence of territory has contested this latest wave of territorialisation driven by (agro)extractive industries

PBI Special Report, 2020

Peace Brigades International Special Report on social struggles in Guatemala's northern province of Alta Verapaz. From a human rights perspective, It tackles the region's history, from colonization and the imposition of capitalism, to the internal armed conflict. It then covers today's major social issues such as impunity, land access and inequalities, indigenous peoples rights, sexual violence and gender inequality, corporate violence, the impacts of monocultures and corrupcion in the justice system.

2016

My study explores how indigenous Q'eqchi' Mayas in Guatemala draw political cohesion from their cultural relationship to their ancestral territories when responding to violent dispossession by extractive mining corporations and mono-crop agriculture. Drawing upon participant observation and 39 interviews conducted in the municipalities of Panzós and El Estor in 2013 and 2014, my research considers Q'eqchi's' defense of territory (defensa del territorio) as a salient, culturally specific collective action that draws continuity from centuries of conflicts over control of land and natural resources in Guatemala. Throughout Spanish colonization, independence, entry into the world capitalist market, and 20 th century political upheavals, conflicts over land have featured consistently. In more recent history, the 36-year internal armed conflict (1960-1996) was a focal point of Q'eqchi' research contributors' testimony on their longstanding and interminable suffering for their lands. As a result of favorable conditions for international investors since the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords, the Guatemalan government has opened up the country, and indigenous lands in particular, to large-scale investment and development. Based on my findings, and building on Liza Grandia's (2012) framing of three "conquests" of Q'eqchi' lands, my study offers the term "fourth conquest" (Knowlton, 2016), a conquest by corporation, to explain the unique conjuncture of forces Q'eqchi's face today when defending their lands. Their current tactical focus on land titling and juridical certainty is a response to the renewed invasion of extractive corporations into their ancestral territories. Through applying informal and social movement learning theories, this study considers Q'eqchi's' political encounters in defense of land as moments of learning which shape them as political actors and subjects. For Q'eqchi's, land represents the confluence of cultural and iii spiritual bonds, material sustenance, and struggles to end political marginalization. A study of the labors involved in defense of territory provides valuable insights into the culturally specific learning processes that both structure and result from myriad political interventions into community, municipal, national, and international politics. Q'eqchi's are strategically forming short and long-term alliances, and adopting identity claims based on indigenous rights, human rights, Guatemalan citizenship, and their cultural ties to their ancestral territory. Chapter 1-Introduction In 2009, as a Master's student in International Education in Washington, DC, I began an internship at the Indian Law Resource Center (ILRC), a non-governmental organization (NGO) offering "legal assistance to Indian and Alaska Native nations who are working to protect their lands, resources, human rights, environment and cultural heritage" (Indian Law Resource Center, 2010). Through ILRC, I spent six weeks in 2009 in El Estor, Guatemala as a volunteer at the local NGO El Estor Association for Integral Development (Asociación Estoreña para el Desarrollo Integral, or AEPDI in Spanish). I accompanied AEPDI to community forums, training events, and other public meetings in the surrounding areas. As part of advocating for government transparency, AEPDI organizes meetings with local elected officials so communities can formulate requests for infrastructure, follow up on promises made on previous projects, and generally establish a face-to-face relationship (AEPDI, n.d.). In addition to state-organized judicial processes, AEPDI also supports traditional Q'eqchi' Mayas' practices for conflict resolution and mediation, as well as traditional decision-making processes (AEPDI, n.d.). During my six weeks in El Estor, the NGO professionals and community members I met introduced me to the Q'eqchi' culture, and to their daily concerns about regaining or maintaining control of their ancestral territories 1. 1 The Q'eqchi' people trace their ancestral roots to the highlands of Cobán, Alta Verapaz. Before Spanish colonization, Q'eqchi's mainly inhabited the present-day departments of Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz, in what Liza Grandia (2012) describes as "a strategic zone between the northern lowland forests, the Atlantic Ocean, and the densely populated western Guatemalan highlands" (p. 30). Q'eqchi's first inhabited the lowlands near the Polochic River during the Preclassic Era (Kahn, 2006, p. 35). 12 According to Guatemalan historian Arturo Taracena (2011), Garífunas, who live on the Caribbean coast across Central America, spanning Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, and Nicaragua, have become "invisible in the conceptualization of Guatemala's ethnic reality" (p. 98) due to the dominant binary conception of identity. Garífunas have roots in Africa and the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, and they maintain their own language and customs. The Garífuna population in Guatemala is concentrated in the municipality of Lívingston, Izabal, where they made up 10% of the population as of 2004 (Kahn, 2006, p. 19).