Afro-Descendant & Indigenous: News & Updates

Guatemala's highest court has sentenced five former paramilitaries to 30 years in prison for raping dozens of indigenous Mayan women during the country's civil war in the 1980s. The men were members of so-called Civil Self-Defense Patrols, armed groups formed and supported by the military. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Guatemala said the sentence was a "landmark advance in the access to the rights to truth, justice and reparation for female victims of sexual violence during" the war.

The community assembly in Nebaj, Guatemala is part of the Ixil’s historical struggle to pursue peaceful and local community-based solutions and transparency to institutional, governmental, and structural corruption and impunity at all levels of government. Guatemala is experiencing a weakening of democratic structures and the further entrenchment of corruption and impunity. Many Indigenous communities have been abandoned by the corrupt state and are displaced from their territories by the armed forces. The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), created in 2006, gave Guatemalans hope that justice would be served to corrupt politicians, but the right-wing and military backlash was swift. In recent years, the Guatemalan state has become increasingly militarized and has overused states of sieges to suspend civil liberties. As a result, some fear that the government is regressing towards authoritarianism. Twenty-five years after the Peace Accords, Guatemalan democracy is at a crucial political juncture in which the safeguards against corruption, impunity, and state violence are being dismantled by the politicians, elites, and military.

Women have been at the forefront of struggle in Honduras throughout its history, from fighting dictatorships to challenging political corruption to seeking civil improvements such as gender parity in politics and education. The recent presidential election of Xiomara Castro Sarmiento Zelaya of the Libertad and Refundación (Libre) party has exhilarated women from various sectors and in the diaspora. And as the first woman president, In her campaign and platform, Castro embraced gender rights and sought to address femicides and structural violence against women and LGBTI communities—issues ignored in previous campaigns. But the most far-reaching policy for women is Castro’s support of the right to sexual and reproductive rights. Now, 67 years after women won the right to vote, Xiomara Castro is promising to be a president of the people and to restore Honduras’s constitutionality and rule of law. It promises to be a new era for women, of all races and ethnicities, and LGBTI communities.