Guatemala is Designed for Impunity

Dear friends,

We hope this finds you all well. We share some of what we are up to in 2023.

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Importance of Grassroots Funding
(April 2023 commentary by Grahame Russell, sent to a Donor’s Conference)

Thank-you for asking for these brief reflections. My thoughts on ‘grassroots funding’ are based on years of work with Rights Action.

As some may know, there are two main aspects to Rights Action’s work. Since 1995, Rights Action has funded and supported community defense struggles, and community development projects mainly in Guatemala and Honduras. Rights Action also provides relief funds (hurricanes, victims of repression and evictions, Covid19, etc.).

By “community defense struggles”, I refer broadly to community-led struggles in defense of land and environment, justice and human rights.

In most cases, the community defense struggles we support are in resistance to the violence, harms, and corruption of different sectors of the global economy: mining, hydro-electric dams, ‘for-export’ food production, tourism, the maquiladora ‘sweatshop’ clothing industry.

Secondly, Rights Action educates in Canada and the U.S., and works to hold legally and politically accountable the U.S. and Canadian governments, our transnational companies, investors and banks, and global “development” banks (i.e., World Bank), that help cause and profit from exploitation and poverty, repression and human rights violations, environmental harms, corruption, and impunity in countries like Honduras and Guatemala.

Through these two aspects of our work, Rights Action is contributing, over the years, to medium and long-term struggle and work to transform how we humans live together in our unjust and unequal local-to-global economic and political orders, on our one and only planet – the ‘pale blue dot’ (with a nod to Carl Sagan) we call earth.

Directly funding community defenders
It is hard to overstate the importance of getting funds - regularly, however so small the amount – directly to community-based (‘frontline’, ‘grassroots’) land and environment, human rights and justice defenders.

It is not a question of money being the solution to the underlying, local-to-global causes of the harms and violences they suffer. There are many other facets of struggle and activism that need to be carried out from the local to global levels, in conjunction with directly supporting the community defenders.

However, the fact is that a majority of land and environment, rights and justice defenders around the world – particularly in ‘global south’ countries like Honduras and Guatemala - live in inter-generational conditions of exploitation and poverty, violence and corruption to begin with.

When they are further victimized by land dispossession, systemic exploitation and human rights violations (usually in relation to one or more sectors of the global economy), it makes their pre-existing life conditions even worse.

It is also a fact that community defenders will struggle to stay in their communities, on their lands, defending their rights and environment as best they can, without outside support. In most cases they literally have no options. They are indeed struggling for their lives, however so impoverished and vulnerable they might be.

Getting them small amounts of funds – a small measure of economic restorative justice, in and of itself - simply helps them do more of this.

What do they use funds for?
Funds are not used for salaries, rent, honorariums, etc.

For the most part, community defenders use funds for the basics: buying phones; buying data for their phones, to enable communication; paying transportation and food costs, when there are gatherings of defenders and community members; carrying out protest and advocacy activities; supporting victims of human rights violations (including when there are deaths and injuries); in the case of forced evictions, securing basic food and shelter for the victims; supporting defenders who have been arbitrarily jailed on trumped up charges; etc.

Since 1995, most of the funds Rights Action has sent to our community-based partner groups go to covering these types of expenses.