GUATEMALA CASE CASTS SPOTLIGHT ON INDIGENOUS GROUP

By SONIA PEREZ DIAZ. Published by AP on 3 July 2013.

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Life for the indigenous Ixil Mayans in the mountains west of Guatemala City is worn and static like an old photograph.

Seventeen years after the end of a civil war that saw hundreds of their villages razed and thousands of their loved ones killed, the Ixil people still live in mud-and-wood houses in the most rugged and isolated parts of northwestern Guatemala. Most of them have no drinking water, paved roads or basic services such as health and education.

Largely ignored by authorities for centuries, the Ixil came under the spotlight after a Guatemalan court found former dictator Efrain Rios Montt guilty of genocide on May 10 for the scorched-earth policies used against the Ixil during his 17 months in power in the 1980s.

The conviction was annulled 10 days later following a trial that did nothing to change their lives of the Ixil people.

Byron Garcia, a social anthropologist who has worked in the area for a decade, said Ixil Mayans live in the same poverty as always.

"People have been relegated to less productive places, places where you can't grow food, to the mountains made of stone," Garcia said. "The young people who can, sow plots of land. And when they can't, they migrate."

Feliciana Cobo was 8 when soldiers attacked her village. She and her family separated and ran into the mountains, where they hid for several days with nothing to eat.

Cobo said her mother was killed when the army bombed the village and surrounding area, and her grandmother died later after growing sick from the cold and bad living conditions. Her family eventually lost their land and their poverty deepened.

Now a single mother of three children, the 40-year-old Cobo borrows electricity from a neighbor and supports her kids by washing the clothes of neighbors and weaving garments to sell.

"I grew up during the civil war and I don't know how to read or write. I didn't go to school," Cobo said. "All I know is to weave."

Forensic experts are now exhuming bodies from the cemeteries that the Ixil people created to bury loved ones who died of starvation, hypothermia and disease — as well as munitions — while they hid from the soldiers in the mountains.

"I helped exhume my mother," Cobo said. "I don't know if it was the smoke or the impact of the bombs planes were dropping on us but we all left running and when we got back together, my mother had already died."

Garcia, who now lives in the Guatemalan capital, said that victims feel a need to tell their stories, to be heard, to be indemnified, to find the bodies of their loved ones and be able to bury them.

Cobo said she doubts justice will be done, but is glad some fellow Ixil Mayans could travel to Guatemala City to tell their stories at the trial.

"We're not inventing the dead," she said.

Link: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/guatemala-case-casts-spotlight-indigenous-group

Guatemalan peasants protesting rights abuses killed, UN dispatched

By Deborah Dupre, author, columnist and rights defender. Published by examiner.com on 6 October 2012.

Thousands of indigenous Guatemalans shouted in anger Friday and the United Nations human rights officers have been dispatched to the Department of Totonicapan in western Guatemala where the military and police brutalized and killed six indigenous people protesting energy and education rights abuses Thursday.

“We have received alarming information that six indigenous peasants were killed and at least 30 injured,” a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Rupert Colville, told reporters in Geneva.

"We were protesting right next to them when they opened fire on us," said Rolando Carrillo, a 25-year-old protester with a bandaged arm and lacerated face he said was from being hit during the clash. Six of the seven dead peasants were buried Friday afternoon in Totonicapan, where thousands gathered as the coffins of local people shot to death passed through the town's central square.

Hundreds shouted "Justice! Justice!" while dozens of mourners hurled themselves toward the coffins in grief.

The Associated Press reports,"Thousands of indigenous Guatemalans shouted in anger Friday about the deaths that occurred during a protest over electricity prices and educational reform in a poor rural area. According to reports, a large number of indigenous people placed several roadblocks in protest against increased electrical tariffs and other basic service provisions.

Mr. Colville noted conflicting reports about the location of the incident. “Details remain unclear and our office in Guatemala is shortly sending two teams of human rights observers – one to Sololá Department and one to Totonicapan – to verify the facts and follow up on the incidents,” he said.

USA Today reports that the protesters were blockading a highway near Totonicapan, about 90 miles west of Guatemala City. President Otto Perez Molina has now acknowledged that government forces opened fire during the protest Thursday. Molina has said earlier that police and troops on the scene were unarmed and that protesters provoked the clash.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, visited Totonicapan during her mission to Guatemala in March. She met with traditional indigenous authorities to discuss a range of human rights concerns. Ms. Pillay had noted that, although indigenous peoples constitute the majority of the nation's population, they continue to be subject to exclusion and denial of their human rights.

Guatemala was among the first signatories of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, that underscores indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination, that is, to participate in decision-making in matters which would affect their rights.

In a May protest, approximately 200 people armed with machetes and guns briefly seized an army outpost in a province bordering Mexico to demand justice for the killing of a man who opposed constructing a hydroelectric plant. In response, Molina declared a state of siege in the area and granted the army emergency powers.

Link: http://www.examiner.com/article/guatemalan-peasants-protesting-rights-abuses-killed-un-dispatched