Guatemala: News & Updates

This past weekend, neighbours and family members gathered in Tzucubal to remember two of the Guatemalan victims who were found dead late last month in an abandoned trailer in Texas: cousins Pascual Melvin Guachiac, 13, and Juan Wilmer Tulul, 14. Pascual’s childhood home buzzed with activity as his grandmother, Manuela Coj, worked alongside other family and friends to prepare food for people visiting to express their condolences. The continuing flow of migration has highlighted a growing desperation in Guatemala, driving children to set off for the US in search of opportunities. 

This past weekend, neighbours and family members gathered in Tzucubal to remember two of the Guatemalan victims who were found dead late last month in an abandoned trailer in Texas: cousins Pascual Melvin Guachiac, 13, and Juan Wilmer Tulul, 14. Pascual’s childhood home buzzed with activity as his grandmother, Manuela Coj, worked alongside other family and friends to prepare food for people visiting to express their condolences. The continuing flow of migration has highlighted a growing desperation in Guatemala, driving children to set off for the US in search of opportunities. 

This past weekend, neighbours and family members gathered in Tzucubal to remember two of the Guatemalan victims who were found dead late last month in an abandoned trailer in Texas: cousins Pascual Melvin Guachiac, 13, and Juan Wilmer Tulul, 14. Pascual’s childhood home buzzed with activity as his grandmother, Manuela Coj, worked alongside other family and friends to prepare food for people visiting to express their condolences. The continuing flow of migration has highlighted a growing desperation in Guatemala, driving children to set off for the US in search of opportunities. 

On behalf of IRTF's Rapid Response Network (RRN) members, we wrote six letters this month to heads of state and other high-level officials in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, urging their swift action in response to human rights abuses occurring in their countries.  We join with civil society groups in Latin America to: (1) protect people living under threat, (2) demand investigations into human rights crimes, (3) bring human rights criminals to justice.

IRTF’s Rapid Response Network (RRN) volunteers write six letters in response to urgent human rights cases each month. We send copies of these letters to US ambassadors, embassy human rights officers, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, regional representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and desk officers at the US State Department. To read the letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/rrn , or ask us to mail you hard copies.

A Guatemalan court has tossed out an agreement that made it easier to prosecute bribery involving the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht — a ruling that favors a former cabinet official accused of corruption. The appeals court annulled an agreement under which Odebrecht had promised to give Guatemalan anti-corruption prosecutors information about bribes it had paid in Guatemala — one of many countries across the hemisphere where it systematically suborned public officials. Under pressure from prosecutors in the U.S., Brazil and elsewhere, the company has admitted paying bribes across Latin America to win government contracts. The company has cooperated with prosecutors in several countries to regain the right to do business. It allegedly paid $17.9 million in bribes to local officials, politicians and private citizens in Guatemala.

On April 27, a group of progressive Members of Congress called for withholding all military and security aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in light of “human rights violations” resulting from “state violence.” In parallel letters to the House Appropriations subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations and to the subcommittee on Defense, which will soon propose 2023 spending bills for each department, the members expressed concern regarding “the use of U.S.-trained and equipped security forces for civilian repression” and sought support from committee leadership to “restrict police and military financing” to all three countries.

In its annual human rights report released last week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has placed Guatemala in chapter  IV.B, reserved for countries that violate aspects of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Analyzing the human rights situation in 2021 in the Organization of American States’ thirty-five member states, the IACHR has grouped Guatemala with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Explaining its decision to include Guatemala in this section, the IACHR cites “structural situations that seriously affect the use and enjoyment of fundamental rights recognized in the American Declaration, the American Convention or other applicable instruments,” including  “systematic noncompliance of the State with its obligation to combat impunity, attributable to a manifest lack of will.”

Rights Action has been very involved in funding and supporting Indigenous land and environmental defenders, and their human rights and justice struggles in the Q’eqchi’ territories of eastern Guatemala since 2004. With the immediacy of this recent trip in mind, Rights Action sends this special appeal for their work and struggles. For a number of complex and very unfortunate reasons, the human rights/ repression/ corruption/ impunity situation is even harder in this region, and has been going on longer, than in other regions of Guatemala – Honduras, as well - where people and communities that Rights Action supports are involved in their own community defense struggles.