Environmental Human Rights: 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.”

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.”

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.

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.

More than one hundred national, international, and solidarity organizations, with a presence in Canada, Europe, the United States, Mexico, Central America, and South America, signed an open letter addressed to the Attorney General's Office of the Republic of El Salvador to demand the immediate release of environmental lawyer Alejandro Henríquez and community leader Ángel Pérez, president of the El Bosque Agricultural Cooperative, who were arbitrarily detained on May 12 and 13, 2025.

In the letter, the organizations condemn the use of security forces to repress the families of the El Bosque community, who were exercising their legitimate right to peaceful protest due to a planned eviction, when they were dispersed by riot police, resulting in the arrest of Ángel Pérez and, subsequently, of lawyer Alejandro Henríquez, who was providing legal advice to the affected families.

Members of the Parliament of the Indigenous Xinka People (PAPXIGUA) gave a press conference on May 8, 2025 in front of the Government Palace in Guatemala City after delivering the results of the community consultation ordered by the Constitutional Court in 2018. The consultation process lasted 7 years, but the resistance against the El Escobal mine, that was arbitrarily installed in the territory, has been ongoing for more than 15 years—with intense moments of repression, including states of siege, attacks and assassinations of their members. Throughout the struggle, the state and corrupt local and international forces have intervened in the consultation process, worked to delay it, spread misinformation, and attempted to modify the results.

This mine has passed through several companies, finally remaining in the hands of the Canadian mining company Pan American Silver, which has yet to respond to the refusal of mining extraction by the Xinka people of Santa Rosa, Jalapa and Jutiapa. The Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM), the state body in charge of this process, must respond to the will of the Xinka people.

Despite community opposition since 2010, the Ministry of Energy and Mines granted the exploitation license in 2013. Communities organized demonstrations in protest. On May 1, 2013, President Otto Pérez Molina declared a State of Siege, deployed 8,000 soldiers and police, suspended constitutional guarantees, and made numerous arrests. Police and protesters were killed during the State of Seige.

 Resistance continued on the streets and in the courts. Judges issued injunctions to suspend mining operations; other judges undid those injunctions. Finally, the highest court of Guatemala (Constitutional Court) ruled on September 3, 2018 that the government must conduct a proper, thorough and transparent consultation with the Xinka people.  After stalling by the Ministry of Energy of Mines and the Ministry of the Interior, the consultation was conducted 2019-2025, and the Xinka people have now formally announced their decision. No to silver mining !

With the persistence that characterizes the Indigenous Peoples of Guatemala, the Xinka people said NO!  In their statement, PAPXIGUA said: “We deny our consent to the Escobal mining project.” We are now awaiting the response from the corresponding entities, as well as actions and calls for solidarity from the Xinka people.  #TheRightToConsentIsRespected

The National Commission of Human Rights in Honduras recently reported that more than 60 human rights defenders, including environmental defenders, were killed under violent circumstances during 2020-2025. The majority of those crimes remain in impunity.

We wrote to the National Commissioner to express our dismay over the lack of justice in the case of environmental defender Juan Antonio López, who was assassinated while walking home from church on September 14, 2024 (cf our letter of 21 SEP 2024). Local bishops, the bishops conference of Latin America, and even the late Pope Francis publicly decried his assassination and called for justice.

As a leading member of the Guapinol Environmental Defense Committee (in Tocoa, Colón Department), Juan López worked tirelessly to protect the Guapinol and San Pedro Rivers from the destructive impacts of the Los Pinares/Ecotek mining project in the Montaña de Botaderos “Carlos Escaleras” National Park. Despite a 2024 presidential decree (Decree 18/2024) designating the park as a protected zone, reports persist that the mining company continues to operate illegally in restricted areas, protected by armed groups and with impunity.

Since 2012, Honduras has recorded at least 149 murders of environmental activists, with one of the highest per capita rates in the world. The similarities between the López case and that of murdered Indigenous Lenca environmental defender Berta Cáceres (March 2, 2016) are striking and deeply troubling: obstruction of justice, denial of state responsibility, and failure to dismantle the networks of corruption and violence that enable these crimes.

Read IRTF’s recent letter demanding justice for Juan López here. To add your name to these urgent human rights letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/RRN/join-RRN .