Dear friends, family, & communities--
I’ve just finished my first two months with ACOGUATE, the international accompaniment project that NISGUA forms a part of, and I write to you full of hope, anger, and contradictions. This letter has taken me longer than I expected to finish, and I thank you for your patience and your generous interpretation of what “monthly” means. (My other letters will be more punctual; I’ve set myself deadlines, although they’ll be more like every six weeks than every month). Working and living here in Guate has allowed me to meet new people from lots of different countries who form part of ACOGUATE, see some incredible places in nature, and learn many lessons about solidarity work. I’m feeling grateful for these and other gifts, and for all of you. In this moment, the political and human ties between the US and Guatemala are perhaps more obvious than usual as the violences of immigration policy make themselves incredibly clear. Working as an accompanier has encouraged me to seek understanding of the parallels between struggles for racial, economic, and social justice in the US and in Guatemala, as well as examine the tools used to curtail movements for justice in both countries, including orchestrated defamation campaigns and criminalization of those organizing the resistance. The developments of the migrant exodus have reached me in the context of Guatemalan news, where it’s been covered widely. Many observe that more people migrate to the US from Guatemala every year than make up the migrant caravan that left from Honduras on October 12, 2018. This “silent caravan” of Guatemalans flees for reasons similar to those that catalyzed the Honduran exodus, and confronts the same harrowing journey north. Like many of you, I’m grieving the deaths of Jakelin Ameí Rosmery Caal Maquin (7 years old) and Felipe Gómez Alonzo (8 years old) in the custody of US Border Patrol mere weeks apart in December: two immediate and visible tragedies that come from so many continuous and slower-moving violences, threaded throughout systems of power in the US and Central America. These are events that make it impossible to ignore the impacts of US foreign policy in Guatemala (and Honduras, and, and, and). These events call on us to act. Jakelin was from San Antonio Secortez, a community outside of Raxruha in Alta Verapaz, and Felipe was from Yalambojoch, a community on the outskirts of Nentón, a town very close to the Mexican border in Huehuetenango. US intervention not only affects Guatemalans who choose or are forced to migrate. International models of extractivism also lead to immense violence, committed largely against poor and Indigenous communities struggling to protect their territories and waters. My work during the last two months has been focused mostly on the theme of criminalization—a strategy used with greater and greater frequency by state and private powers against the community resistance leaders of many struggles across Guatemala. In the areas I have had the opportunity to visit and work with, Indigenous communities are confronting companies like Goldcorp (Canadian), Tahoe Resources (US/Canadian, recently acquired by Canadian company Pan American Silver), Energía y Renovación (Guatemalan) and Hidralia (Spanish), which seek to construct natural resource extraction projects—nickel and silver mines, hydroelectric dams—on their lands. These communities have the inherent right, as part of their self-determination and human dignity, to be brought into decision-making about their land in a consultation—an ancestral practice to achieve consensus in decisions that affect an entire community. Furthermore, Guatemala ratified the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 in 1989, supposedly recognizing communities’ right to give or not give their free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) of a project. Many times, this right is violated when government bodies like the MEM (Ministry of Energy and Mining) and MARN (Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources) circumscribe environmental studies, deny the legitimacy of community referenda, or expedite the licensing process without holding a community consultation at all (click here to read more about community consultations and sign NISGUA’s solidarity action demanding state respect for them.) A frequent result, two or five or ten years down the line, is a company with a questionably- or illegally-granted license and a growing resistance movement in the affected communities, many of whose members would face displacement, economic instability, and health concerns as consequences of the construction of the projects. Movements’ leaders are consistently targeted in defamation campaigns, by criminalization, and by threats against their lives and safety. The threats are only amplified by the fact that many are also Indigenous authorities, and therefore are already marginalized both in society at large and specifically by the Guatemalan state, which often refuses to recognize Indigenous leaders, decisions, and legal systems. Many Mayan communities have retained ancestral governments and legal structures that operate from a cosmovision of justice, property, and leadership distinct from that of the state system. The concepts of natural balance and mutuality, complementary (rather than oppositional) duality, and consensus-based decision-making form an understanding of justice whose goal is to seek a new equilibrium between two sides of a conflict rather than to castigate a guilty party. The role of Indigenous leaders is also shaped by this communitarian philosophy; they are expected to follow and respond to the desires of their community rather than making decisions based on their own interests. At times, the state and Indigenous frameworks can exist simultaneously without conflict, but more often, where they overlap, the police and the Ministerio Público (a rough equivalent to the US Attorney General’s office) criminalize the actions of Indigenous authorities rather than recognizing their legitimacy. Both the siting of extractivist projects on Indigenous land and the subsequent criminalization of resistance leaders are part of a legacy inherited from the internal armed conflict that took place in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996; the same disregard for Indigenous lives and ways of life that motivated massacres, disappearances, cultural erasure, and sexual violence during the conflict has persisted in subtler forms since the signing of the peace agreements. For example, a mining law signed in 1997 created incentives to foreign investment—such as access to local water supplies, the reduction of royalties from six to one percent, and duty-free imports on materials used for operation—that opened up Indigenous land to further exploitation in the name of development. The map of places where massacres took place during the conflict and the map of resource extraction project sites are nearly identical. One of the Indigenous leaders affected by state racism, violence, and criminalization is Pascual. Pascual is the last of eleven political prisoners from San Pablo, San Marcos, a rural western department, to be released from prison. I had the opportunity to visit him during an accompaniment in November, and it was humbling to witness his continued enthusiasm even after three years of unjust imprisonment: in the same breath, he remembered his four-year-old granddaughter’s fear on the day of his capture, then talked about his continued conviction to continue in the struggle for her sake and that of all future generations. Pascual was apprehended by the police in 2015 after being named in an accusation related to events that occurred on July 8, 2014. Two engineers arrived in his community to take pictures of the planned construction site for the hydroelectric project HidroSalá (acting on the license granted in 2011, in spite of the lack of a community consultation and an environmental study). After learning why they were there, the community told the engineers that they were not welcome and called an assembly of the Consejo Maya Mam (Maya Mam Council) to have the engineers meet with authorities and sign an acta, or a statement—a common way such meetings are documented and formalized in Mayan communities. In his capacity as a member of the Consejo Maya Mam and because of his leadership of the movement against HidroSalá, Pascual was named along with three other leaders in the engineers’ accusation of kidnapping. This is one of the charges most frequently used in cases of criminalization, especially against authorities fulfilling their role by mediating disputes. He was held in prison awaiting trial, as well as a decision on changes to the charges against him, before being released on October 26th, 2018. When Pascual returned to his community, he was met by a huge crowd in the central square. In our conversation with him, he reflected that his imprisonment had the unintended effect of energizing the resistance movement, as many of his friends and neighbors who had not previously been involved in organizing against the hydroelectric project became more aware by witnessing his family’s struggles in his absence—the effects of incarceration, of course, don’t end with the individual, but reach spouses, families, and whole communities through economic insecurity and psychological harm on various levels. Although he experienced incredible hardships in his three years of imprisonment, Pascual spoke with as much energy and ire as ever, repeating “Vamos a seguir adelante,”--We’ll keep going forward. Incarceration is one of many ways criminalization can affect movement leaders; another is the weaponization of órdenes de captura, or arrest warrants. Frequently people can have arrest warrants out against them without knowing it. They may not yet be on the list of those with warrants, but may know that all their neighbors have one and that they may be charged at any moment. They can even be captured if they go to the police or the Ministerio Público to find out their status, or to report a crime committed against them. The police may wait months or years to act on the orders, using the possibility of capture as a threat to inflict psychological harm, to prevent them from accessing justice, or to keep them trapped in their communities since they cannot travel without fear of being stopped. Some movement leaders have also received medidas sustitutivas, or alternative measures similar to a parole with conditions, in lieu of or following jail time; they can require registration with the police every 15 or 30 days and in effect restrict or completely cut off access to employment, the right to meet with other community members, and travel, even for healthcare or emergencies. Órdenes de captura and medidas sustitutivas, along with incarceration, are designed to sow fear, debilitate organizing, and cut movements off from their leaders. As long as the resistance movement in San Pablo has existed, its leaders and members have faced these various arms of criminalization, and the movement is always contending with its community-wide effects: more or less constant fear among those who haven’t yet been targeted, the loss of continuity caused by the absence or limited movement of leaders, and the hardships that accompany the incarceration of family members. These legal measures form a criminalization strategy that resembles ones used against other movements; in fact, my first thought after learning about the reality that the communities in San Pablo, San Marcos face was of the Black Liberation movement of the 1960s, whose leaders were steadily and systematically targeted by the FBI in their counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO). The Black Panther Party, largely due to their claim of the right to self-defense against police brutality and other racist violence, was a central target of criminalization; their offices and the homes of their members were subjected to warrantless searches and wiretaps and members were arrested on the street for selling newspapers. Leaders were also targeted, among them Fred Hampton, who was killed on December 4, 1969 by the Chicago Police with the aid of an FBI informant. In this wave of attacks, state and legal institutions criminalized organizing and stopped members of resistance movements from accessing their rights—to assemble, to resist, to live—imposing the categories “legal” and “illegal” along a rubric that helped the US government to silence dissent. On top of this, popular historical memory of the Black Panthers erases both the full truth of their political and communitarian commitments and the state violence used against them. Surveillance and criminalization of Black liberation movements continues today, through methods such as crackdowns on peaceful protests, infiltration by undercover police, and even FBI anti-terrorism investigations of so-called “Black identity extremists.” It is all too frequent that our systems and ideas of legality are employed in ways that directly contradict our humanity. When the United States defines refugees crossing its border as illegal, or criminalizes groups asserting their right to organize for liberation from racism, when the Guatemalan government grants licenses to corporations against the will and wellbeing of the affected communities, these policies result in death. And in these moments the frameworks that are supposed to help us define justice instead tangle their bureaucratic, militarized limbs into the lives of people reacting to the simplest necessities at the grandest scale: the right to migrate and the right to stay home, the right to water, to community, to choice. This is no accident; many of those frameworks and institutions are predicated on the denial of the humanity of people of color, migrants, LGBTQI folks, and people with disabilities. But while we continue to use the laws and legal systems we have, we are also called to imagine outside of them—imagine a justice and a way of being with one another that serves the humanity of everyone. In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown asks: “How do we cultivate the muscle of radical imagination needed to dream together beyond fear? Showing Black and white people sitting at a lunch counter together was science fiction.” Action toward justice might always start as science fiction, a brave manifestation of convictions contrary to the reality we live in. Positive collective imagining like this is what is giving me hope. During an accompaniment visit I went on this past November, a human rights defender we accompany told us about his imagined future, in which his children can reclaim “the land where the rivers are born” from the hydroelectric company, further up the mountain he lives on. His children’s economic and ecological stability ensured, the threat of órdenes de captura nonexistent, their right to the land and the water restored—that’s the future that keeps him meeting, fighting, resisting. ▪ Sources and further reading: Resources and readings on the 2018 migrant caravan; info on the criminalization of Black liberation movements; an article on medical negligence in Jakelin Caal’s death; a resource for context on Guatemala’s 1997 mining law; former accompanier Clara Lincoln’s letter on gentrification and displacement; NISGUA’s action in solidarity with Indigenous self-determination; NISGUA’s end-of-year report.
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