Rights Action
April 19, 2020
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Dear friends,
Over the last month, we have sent $18,000 of your donations (in grants ranging from $200 to $2000) to partner groups in Honduras and Guatemala (see summary below) taking the lead in responding to Covid19 that is worsening the “normal” pandemics of exploitation-poverty and discrimination, land dispossession, human rights violations and repression.
STAY in your homes!
We are hungry …
While Covid19 is affecting people from ‘all walks of life’, in our unjust, unequal global human order - both inside nations and between rich/wealthy and dominated/exploited nations – Covid19 is harming and killing (directly and indirectly) more people who live in chronic conditions of exploitation and poverty, discrimination and abandonment, violence and repression.
We are not “all in this together”
We should not work to “get back to normal”
We are concerned by the now-even-more precarious living conditions of partner communities in Honduras and Guatemala. We are concerned by the precarious conditions of thousands of Guatemalans and Hondurans forced to flee into exile by the violence, corruption and exploitation of their military-backed governments. Many have been ‘criminalized’, and are illegally detained in unsanitary, crowded detention centers, jails and ad hoc camps in Mexico and the U.S.
It bears repetition that the Honduran and Guatemalan regimes are fully supported by the U.S. and Canadian governments, by the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and IMF, and by global companies and investors that contribute to corruption, exploitation and violence, so as to operate mines and hydro-electric dams, to produce ‘for-export’ coffee, sugarcane, African palm, bananas and pineapples, and to operate garment ‘sweatshop’ factories and tourism businesses.
Canada, U.S. and the so-called ‘international community’ are happy to do business-as-usual with these regimes that have little interest to support their most vulnerable communities in “normal” times, let alone during a pandemic such as Covid19.
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Your funds at work
Rights Action is sending Covid19 response funds to community groups we have funded and worked with for many years.
$18,000 have been sent to:
- Mayan Q’eqchi’ partner groups in mining (Skye Resources/ Hudbay Minerals/ Solway Investment Group) harmed communities of El Estor, eastern Guatemala: $5,300
- Mayan Achi partner groups in the Rabinal region of central Guatemala, devastated by U.S.-backed genocides and World Bank/IDB’s brutal Chixoy dam project of 1980s: $3,000
- Partner group in south-central Guatemalan communities resisting mining (Tahoe Resources/ Pan American Silver) harms: $700
- Garifuna partner group in the tourism/ African palm harmed communities of Honduras’ north coast: $4,400
- Lenca partner groups and members of Berta Caceres’ family resisting dams and mining harms in western Honduras: $1,800
- Partner groups in western Honduras communities resisting mining (Aura Minerals) harms: $1,200
- Individual Hondurans and Guatemalans in precarious refugee/ forced migrancy conditions in the U.S. or Mexico: $1,500
Partners use funds to:
- Educate about Covid19, as government and media information sources are of little use for impoverished majorities.
- Educate about social distancing, cleaning hands and living spaces, wearing face masks or (minimally) clothes and bandanas.
- Educate about community monitoring, to limit (as possible) the coming and going of people.
- With safety precautions, carrying out home visits to monitor vulnerable community members’ health.
- Where possible, establish community locations to isolate and support community members suspected of contracting Covid19.
- Educate about strengthening immune systems through use of herbal teas and consumption of productions produced locally.
- Buy personal protection equipment for community members leading community support work.
- Buy basic foods (priority given to locally produced) for most needy community members.
- Buy potable water (boiled if necessary) and soap.
The best solution to Covid19, as with so many injustices, violence and inequalities plaguing the lives of so many humans, is people, communities and governments working together and collaborating to create societies and a global community based on mutual well-being and fundamental equality inside and between nations.
This is always the case. This is what Rights Action, and our partner groups in Guatemala and Honduras, have long been working for.
Send any comments and questions my way
Thank-you
Grahame Russell, Rights Action
[email protected]
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Tax-Deductible Donations (Canada & U.S.)
To support the Covid19 response work of our partner groups in Honduras and Guatemala, make check to "Rights Action" and mail to:
- U.S.: Box 50887, Washington DC, 20091-0887
- Canada: (Box 552) 351 Queen St. E, Toronto ON, M5A-1T8
