Afro-Descendant & Indigenous: News & Updates

Guatemala has more fresh water than most countries, but its Indigenous population lacks safe, reliable access.

Human Rights Watch emphasized that the Guatemalan military’s legacy of racist policies continued to shape water access. During the country’s civil war, military campaigns targeted Indigenous communities, destroying infrastructure and displacing populations. Post-war reconstruction efforts largely excluded Indigenous areas, perpetuating inequality. The report stated, “The Guatemalan military’s historical role in marginalizing Indigenous communities laid the groundwork for today’s water crisis. Infrastructure development has consistently prioritized urban, non-Indigenous regions.”

The recent arrests of two Maya leaders is emblematic of increasing repression and criminalization of Indigenous peoples by the Guatemalan state. With regards to Guatemala’s current state of affairs, many claim that the Public Ministry, Attorney General, and various judges criminalize human rights defenders and Indigenous peoples. It has been over two months since Pacheco and Chaclán were arrested, and the case is symbolic of the justice system in Guatemala, which works in favor of the Pact of Corrupt. “We are in a country that lives off corruption, that protects corruption, and that maintains impunity in many cases,” Herrera says. Yet, what is clear in talking to Herrera is that despite this criminalization and institutional challenges, they will continue to struggle undeterred and seek Pacheco’s and Chaclán’s freedom. 

In Guatemala, the site of some of Israel’s most abhorrent war crimes outside of Palestine, the reality of Israeli warmongering is well documented. Israel’s instrumentality in the decades-long civil war and state-sponsored genocide of the Indigenous Maya provides critical context for the genocide of Palestinians today.

Current relations between Israel and Guatemala are bound to this bloody history and fueled by the relationship between Zionism and an Evangelicalism informed by two biblical interpretations.

An estimated 200,000 Maya and, to a lesser extent, Ladino (also known as Mestizo) people of mixed Indigenous and European descent, were killed or disappeared during the 36-year Guatemalan civil war that was fought between 1960 and 1996.

However, it was between 1981 and 1983 – especially under the leadership of Efraín Ríos Montt, a Pentecostal Evangelical, and at the height of Israel’s military involvement – that “more than half the massacres and scorched earth operations occurred,” according to the UN-sponsored Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH).

Established in 1994 to investigate the history of human rights violations and acts of violence throughout the armed conflict, the CEH found that “agents of the state of Guatemala, within the framework of counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people which lived in the four regions analyzed.”

And Israel’s fingerprints were all over Ríos Montt’s atrocities.

In the wake of his coup d’état on 23 March 1982, Ríos Montt told an ABC reporter that it had succeeded “because many of our soldiers were trained by the Israelis.”

In 1983, his chief of staff General Héctor López Fuentes also confirmed that, “Israel is our principal supplier of arms and the number one friend of Guatemala in the world.”

SUMMARY

IRTF has been a member of the Honduras Solidarity Network since the coup 16 years ago that ousted their democratically-elected president, Mel Zelaya. Although the current government is considered post-coup, the administrations since 2009 implemented a lot of changes that benefit the oligarchy at the expense of Indigenous, Afro-descendant and campesino communities. Although state-led repression is less now, the network of coup proponents, corrupt actors and organized crime continue to have influence and to act, even violently, against the peoples’ movements.

Read our full statement on the anniversary of the coup here.

On June 27, 1954, a coup d’état deposed the democratically elected Soldado del Pueblo (Soldier of the People): President Jacobo Árbenz Guzman. He was the face of Guatemala’s democratic revolution, which began in 1944. The agrarian reform of 1952, redistributing unused land to landless Indigenous peasants, impacted the United Fruit Company (UFCO), the largest land owner in Guatemala, and U.S. foreign policy, as Cold War tensions grew. Collaborating with Guatemalan fascists, they plunged Guatemala into decades of U.S. backed dictatorships. On its 70th anniversary, we invite you to reflect with us on this counter-revolutionary event and what it might mean for Guatemala and the world today.

Giovanni Batz’s carefully researched text examines how the Ixil and K’iche’ Mayas have resisted attacks on their land, state violence, and extraction since Spanish colonization.

From February 1-6, 2025, Marco Rubio traveled to Central America for his first official visits as U.S. Secretary of State. With the exception of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Belize, every country hosted Rubio. His stated aim was “to advance President Trump’s America First foreign policy.” The four axes of this policy for the region are: migration, organized crime, China, and U.S. economic investment. These are part of his administration’s broad strategy to re-assert exclusive U.S. political and economic dominance in the region it has long considered its “back yard.”

The people of Guatemala continue to face the systematic and manufactured dispossession brought by capitalism and U.S. imperialism.

As Rubio’s visit demonstrates, the life of the people of Guatemala and the people of the United States is tightly interconnected—economically, (geo)politically, socially, ecologically. What happens here impacts there, and what happens there impacts here. For better or for worse. 

It’s time for a renewed internationalist solidarity movement with the people of Guatemala

As Trump returns to power, our new analysis exposes how U.S.-Guatemala agreements threaten vulnerable communities through mass deportations and exploitation of resources. Through powerful testimonies from Indigenous leaders fighting for territorial rights and messages of solidarity with the Guatemalan diaspora, we illuminate the transnational resistance taking root. From ADH’s fight for community water rights to CODIDENA’s successful resistance against mining extraction, these stories reveal how communities are protecting vital resources despite increasing pressure. Join our movement for justice that transcends borders — dive deeper into Guatemala’s ongoing struggle for sovereignty and dignity.

By Melissa Berkey-Gerard

Bryan Stevenson says, “Everyone is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.” Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, defends those who are unfairly imprisoned, especially those wrongfully condemned to death row in the US. He has dedicated his life to ending the injustice that is the death penalty. If we start with the belief that each person is deserving of grace and dignity, regardless of what they have done, we can imagine a different approach. A premise that people deserve a second chance, a real opportunity for transformation and restoration, healing from trauma and a way out of poverty. An outlook that recognizes that the current system both criminalizes poverty, and profits from incarceration. 

The undersigned concerned individuals, scholars, human rights organizations, environmental organizations, and representatives of the tourism sector in Rio Dulce are writing to express our serious concerns over mining activities planned to be carried out by the Canadian company Central America Nickel (CAN) via their subsidiaries Rio Nickel S.A. and Nichromet S.A in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Guatemala.

As you will see in the news articles and timeline below, opposition to mining in this region is vehement and virtually unanimous by Indigenous Q’eqchi’ Maya communities. Moreover, community members, tourism sector representatives, environmental experts, public health authorities, leading scholars, and human rights NGOs see any form of mining in the Santa Cruz Mountains as a fundamental threat to Indigenous sovereignty, to human rights, and to the local water supply.