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News Article

The new Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo thanks indigenous people for ensuring a peaceful transfer of power. Arévalo said with their 106 day long presence in front of the prosecutor’s office in Guatemala City they were able to save democracy.

At the same time, they were deprived in advance of the opportunity to vote for the Movement for the Liberation of the Peoples (MLP) party. MLP also fights for plurinationalism which is an important  issue for indigenous people. Maya Waqib’ Kej National Convergence and the Campesino Development Committee (CODECA) argues that the Guatemalan nation-state was founded by a small criollo elite that legalized racism and sexism, marginalizing women and Indigenous and Black peoples for the last 200 years. It stresses the need for grassroots solutions to construct a new plurinational state, defined as “the expressed will of all the peoples and sectors that coexist in a country.”  For some, a plurinational state would reorganize social relationships and rectify long-standing structural and institutional inequalities by recognizing Indigenous territorial rights, political autonomy, and buen vivir (good living/living well) as an alternative to capitalism.

News Article

After the elections in Guatemala, the “Pact of the Corrupt” tried to prevent the transfer of power to the democratically elected Bernardo Arevalo, who surprisingly won. But indigenous people managed to organize quickly and prevent this from happening. It was not an obvious battle for them to defend the representative democracy of a system from which they are excluded. Women, who are even more discriminated against in this system, have played a central role in this.
Abigail Monroy, Maya Kaqchikel and ancestral authority of Chuarrancho, said that now “we have a president who understands the people and is willing to work with the people”, but it is also “just a turning point on a long road”.

News Article

The anti-mining activist Juan Lopez said in an interview three years ago: "If you leave home, you always have in mind that you do not know what might happen, if you are going to return." The reason for that were threats from people whose interests clashed with Juan's activism.

Human rights organisations have been warning for a long time about the dangerous situation for environmental activists in Honduras. Now Juan Lopez was killed and people in charge like President Xiomara Castro now must take a stand.

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