“Thank you for coming to visit us.  We are not here because we are criminals, or because we did something illegal, we are here because we are struggling for justice.  I have been tortured two times – the President sent someone to torture me.  I have been in prison for five months and my father died in this time from the sadness and pain of everything that is happening to me.  I’ve been told that if I get out of prison and return to my home I will be killed.  What is happening today makes us remember the armed conflict, and we don’t want this anymore in Guatemala… I speak from the heart.  I fear for my life.  They have said they are going to kill me if I return home.  They said they are going to kill my daughter, who is two and a half years old, and my wife… We are never going to allow the people of Barillas to be exploited. During the armed conflict in the 80s, the military wasn’t able to enter Barillas to burn the municipality.  If we didn’t let them enter in the 80s, we certainly aren’t going to let them enter today!” 

 

Mynor López, a local community leader, said these words as he stood in a jail courtyard last week in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. Along with two other political prisoners, he had been brought down from his cell to speak to twelve of us from a School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) delegation.

Our delegation had spontaneously decided to visit the jail after hearing the story behind their imprisonment in a meeting with the Association of the Peoples of Huehuetenango (ADH), a regional indigenous network that brings together many groups from across the state of Huehuetenango and is resisting the take over of their lands by transnational corporations for mining and dams. We had been told how important this moment in time is for the Huehuetenango region of the country as re-militarization under the auspices of combatting drug trafficking is being used as a pretext for controlling territory for the corporations, forcibly displacing people. As one man told us, “The country has gone off course from the Peace Accords [1996]. The current government is a military regime and treats us like internal enemies.”

In this environment, dissent is treated as if it were terrorism. López, an active member of the resistance to the dam, found himself in prison after he was seized while walking by a church, put into a military helicopter, and flown to the capital.  López had been a visible member of the opposition to the building of a dam when President Otto Perez Molina, a School of the Americas graduate, visited Barillas earlier that month. He has been accused of possession of guns and terrorism. The other two prisoners – Rogelio Velásquez and Saul Méndez, both community leaders in the struggle against the dam – were imprisoned for 8 months in 2012 along with other leaders after security guards for the dam company provoked the community by murdering Andrés Pedro Miguel during a Municipal festival. Just a few months after Rogelio and Saul got out of jail, they traveled the long journey to Guatemala City for what was supposedly the final hearing to close their case, only to find themselves arrested by agents in civilian clothes, suddenly accused of lynching a woman over two years ago.  Strategically, this was chosen as it can be tried in the Guatemala’s new Femicide Courts, carrying a very long prison term, despite having nothing to do with them.

The struggle these men have been involved in has its roots in the ongoing fight for human rights and land rights that were central to the 36-year internal armed conflict in Guatemala and the genocide that left 200,000 dead, 50,000 disappeared, and 1,000,000 displaced. Though the extreme violence receded, the struggle has continued.

The ADH was formed in 2005 to fight against the proliferation of mining and dam licenses that were being granted to corporations by the government. ADH spokespersons reported that in just the Mam-speaking region of Huehuetenango alone, there have been 101 licenses granted. As one person said, “We will be covered in mines.” Ironically, many of the mining licenses are for gold and silver, the very same metals that fueled the Spanish conquest.

At risk is not just a local economy based on coffee and a remarkable biodiversity, but the very water itself and the life of the people that drink that water, as cyanide, arsenic and other deadly chemicals will be leached into the aquifers as a result of the mining process. “They are coming to take our resources,” one community leader told us. Another major threat, especially in Santa Cruz Barillas comes from the building of hydroelectric dams, in particular by a Spanish company that has incorporated in Barillas as Hidro Santa Cruz.

A primary resistance strategy of ADH has been to use the United Nations’ International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169, which grants to indigenous peoples the right to be consulted about the extraction of minerals on their lands. Over the past decade, the group has conducted community consultations in 28 of the 32 municipalities in the region, with people representing 10 different languages. This methodology has been replicated in some 70 consultancies in the country, as well as in other countries, including Panama, Mexico, and El Salvador. By ADH’s reckoning, 46,490 people in their region have voted no to mining and dam projects in these consultancies.

But the Guatemalan government refuses to recognize the legality of these consultancies and according to the ADH spokespersons, they jail any community leaders who refuse to be bought off. On May 1, 2012, in response to years of stalwart local resistance that had prevented the dams from being built, provocateurs attacked a Barillas crowd during a community festival and subsequently, the government imposed a military state of siege in the region, the equivalent of martial law. Nine people were put in jail, including Velásquez and Méndez, and 28 warrants were issued for others. On September 28 and 29, 2013, the government again converged on Barillas (with reportedly 3,000 police and 2,000 soldiers) but was prevented from entering the town by the people in the surrounding municipalities.  Tear gas flowed and helicopters circled overhead.

Since that time, the situation continues to be tense, with outstanding arrest warrants, legal cases, and threats.  For those in prison, the punishment has been severe. Velásquez reflected on his first time in prison for a publication, Voices from the River: Stories of Political Persecution in Barillas, from the Guatemalan Human Rights Defenders Protection Unit (UDEFEGUA, from the Spanish).

“They created a great suffering for those of us who were imprisoned.  In jail we could not bear what they were trying to do to us, we wanted to see the end.  We couldn’t bear it for the threats and the crimes that they attributed to us.  While we were imprisoned the company came to threaten us.  To conquer us, they offered us money for the rest of our lives and said they would get us out of jail and we could go to another place to not be in conflict with our people or our community.  But it was a lie.  

Thanks to God, I was able to rise above the pressure, because of my family. I needed to live.  The company attacked our family with threats…. in the case of my wife she did not accept being threatened or intimidated….

They have accused us of kidnapping, terrorism, of being Zetas (drug traffickers), and violent acts in which we have never participated.  This has been a great obstacle for us, up until today.  For me, this is a policy that is being carried out by the company.  I see that the government is acting corruptly, a dirty job against our people….  

As of today, they continue to threaten us… the message is that if we keep talking, they are going to find a way for us to no longer exist.  It is a threat against our life.”

The repression in this local community comes in the larger political context of the Guatemalan Constitutional Court over-ruling the genocide conviction of former president José Efrain Rios Montt and ordering a re-trial. That court also decided to end the term of the attorney general who brought that case to court, Claudia Paz y Paz, ruling that her term would be over in May 2014 rather than in December 2014 as expected. Both of these rulings have sent a chilling air of foreboding through the country, raising the nightmare possibility of a return to impunity for the military government and the specter of widespread violence and repression.

In this light, the courage of Mynor López speaking out from jail is striking indeed. Surrounded by cameras and microphones from the local media covering our visit, he called out for justice, both for himself and his community:

What is happening today makes us remember the armed conflict, and we don’t want this anymore in Guatemala.  I want to send a message to the communities to keep up the struggle…  We have the right to protest, to value our land and value the campesino population… They won’t take me to the hearings in my case.  I want to be heard.  Why am I not heard in the courts?  There is going to be a hearing in my case soon and I want to be heard.  They do not want me to be heard. 

 

These three prisoners are emblematic of many others in Guatemala and Central America who are struggling against military/corporate attacks against them and their lands. Those of us in the SOAW delegation know very well how these attacks are supported and fostered by the United States. It is certainly no coincidence that President Otto Perez Molina and former president and convicted genocide perpetrator Rios Montt are both graduates of the School of the Americas and that the number of Guatemalan soldiers sent to the School of the Americas, now called Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), has doubled under the Perez Molina administration.

The danger for the people of Guatemala did not end with the Peace Accords in 1996. It has simply been transformed into a more endemic neoliberal method of theft, exploitation, and imprisonment. At this time, it may again also erupt into the kind of open violence and killing that Guatemala still painfully remembers and bears the scars of.

Let us hope that the efforts of Mynor López, Rogelio Velásquez, and Saul Méndez and all of their comrades in resistance will draw the attention and support of the international community and that justice for all the peoples of Guatemala will prevail.

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