Creative Commons
Protesters in Guatemala City on October 20, 2021.
The Maya Q’eqchi communities in the Guatemalan municipality of El Estor find themselves under a state of siege declared by President Alejandro Giammattei’s administration to protect business interests in the region. This declaration was issued October 24, after more than two weeks of protests by residents who were demanding their voices be heard in a pending consultation over a nickel mining project in the region.
“The Guatemalan state is willing to break its own legality in order to guarantee the interests of a private capital.”
“It is an unnecessary state of siege, particularly since the conflict could have been resolved through dialogue and consensus, through listening to the communities that expressed their disagreement with the process,” Carlos Menocal, former Minister of the Interior during the administration of President Álvero Colom, tells The Progressive. “The state of siege is an instrument used by Alejandro Giammattei to benefit the mining operation and to benefit a consultation process that has been questioned by most communities.”
According to Menocal, none of the people arrested during the state of siege have anything to do with the protests against the mine.
The state of siege has also allowed the government to silence dissent as the country’s Ministry of Energy and Mining advances with its consultation of the communities over the nearly fifty-year-old mining concession of the Fenix Project, which is currently owned by the Swiss Solway Group.
Police have raided the houses of known activists who have challenged and protested the mine and detained a local leader of the artesanal fishermen’s organization on an arrest warrant from 2017, for which he had been acquitted.
“[We are worried by] the significant number of attacks against social and community leadership in the sector of people and organizations defending human rights,” Jorge Santos, the General Coordinator of the organization Guatemalan Human Rights Defenders Unit or UDEFEGUA, tells The Progressive.
Among those targeted by the police and intelligence agencies are local community journalists who have covered the protests against the mine in El Estor.
In the week following the declaration, police raided the houses of Carlos Choc and Juan Bautista Xol, both local correspondents for the independent media outlet Prensa Comunitaria, as well as the offices of local radio station Xyaab’ Tzuultaq’a. The attacks on the press have raised concerns from international press freedom and Guatemalan human rights organizations.
“Guatemalan police must show that they are able and willing to distinguish between protesters and the press, and cease harassing journalists for covering demonstrations in El Estor,” Natalie Southwick, the Latin America and the Caribbean Program Coordinator for the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, said in a statement. “Authorities must recognize that journalists have a right to cover demonstrations and ensure they are able to do so safely, instead of treating them like criminals simply for doing their jobs.”
The current state of siege highlights a systemic problem.
“So that implies a state that is willing to exercise higher levels of violence,” Santos says. “This means benefiting a private actor who is committing crimes by disobeying a judicial decision. The Guatemalan state is willing to break its own legality in order to guarantee the interests of a private capital.”
The nickel reserve, identified in the 1950s, is among the largest in Latin America. The mine has been the source of social conflict since it was first identified and resulted in the assassination of Aadolfo Mijangos, a congressional critic of the mine, who Eduardo Galeano suggests in the book Days and Nights of Love and War was killed for speaking out against corruption related to the mine in 1971, as well as the illegal evictions of communities.
In the early 2000s, Canadian mining giant Hudbay acquired the mining project and further continued the violence.
In 2007, eleven Indigenous Maya Q’eqchi women were raped by security forces during an eviction of the village of Lote Ocho, which the company claimed was a part of their private property. Two years later in 2009, a resident named German Chub Choc was shot and paralyzed, and another, Adolfo Ich Chamán, was shot and killed by private security forces during a protest against the mine.
Ich Chamán’s widow, Angelica Choc, has pursued the Canadian company and its former Guatemalan subsidiary for the murder. She filed a lawsuit against the company for his death. After the outcry against Hudbay, Solway group acquired the mine.
In 2017, police responded to protests by local fishers decrying the contamination of Lake Izabal by deploying riot police. During the protests, police opened fire on protesters, shooting and killing Carlos Maaz, a local fisher.
Faced with the long history of repression and violence, environmentalists and Indigenous communities challenged the mine in Guatemala’s highest court, the Constitutional Court.
In 2019, the court ruled that the development of the mining had violated the rights of Indigenous communities to prior consultation and suspended the mine’s license. Nonetheless, the project continued to operate.
And now, in 2021, the current state of siege has permitted the mine to continue to function, with police protecting trucks from the mine as documented in videos by Prensa Comunitaria.
“We are very concerned about the climate that is being established in the country in terms of the use of states of exception, as the mechanism for exercising power in the country,” Santos says. “The abuse of authority, the abuse of power, the committing of serious human rights violations that are being observed in the sector.”
This article was changed after publication to address a claim from Solway Group that it is a Swiss company, not Russian-Swiss as previously stated.