Since mid-March, Rights Action has sent $43,000 in regular, small grants ($250-$1500) to community groups mainly in Honduras and Guatemala doing whatever they can to respond to Covid19, a pandemic that is worsening the “normal” pandemics of systemic impoverishment and racism, land dispossession, human rights violations and repression, corruption and impunity.
‘White flag’ movement, spreading across Guatemala and Central America, signaling hunger
Rights Action is deeply concerned by the ‘now-even-more’ precarious conditions of a majority of the populations of Honduras and Guatemala whose military-backed governments maintain full relations with the U.S. and Canadian governments, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and IMF, and global companies and investors operating mines and hydro-electric dams, ‘sweatshop’ factories and tourism businesses, and producing ‘for-export’ coffee, sugarcane, African palm, bananas and pineapples.
These regimes do little to support their majority populations in “normal” times, let alone when further devastated by Covid19.
We are NOT “all in this together”
We should NOT work to “get back to normal”
Community groups use funds primarily for
- Buying basic foods, securing access to water for most needy community members.
- Covid19 education and implementation of prevention measures.
- Planting community and family gardens, with focus on production of medicinal plants and wide variety of local foods.
- Land and territory defense struggles. In the midst of the full-on Covid19 crisis, wealthy actors – national and international – continue to use corruption and violence to advance their economic interests.
Community-based partner groups
Mayan Achi communities, Rabinal, central Guatemala: A region devastated by U.S.-backed genocides and World Bank/IDB’s brutal Chixoy dam
- Rio Negro community: $1,300
- Pacux refugee community: $5,520
Maya Achi women – their families originally from the village of Rio Negro - organize and hand out food packets to the most needy in their community of Pacux. On the walls: Photos of their Rio Negro family and community members killed viciously (many girls and women raped first) – over 450 killed, in total - in a series of massacres in 1981 committed by the U.S.-backed regime, to help make way for the construction of the Chixoy dam, a “development” investment project of the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank.
Garifuna communities, north shore Honduras: Systematically attacked and under siege by global tourism and African palm industries
Map and statistics of indigenous people and impoverishment in Honduras, worsened by Covid19.
Xinka and campesino communities, south-central Guatemala: Resisting, since 2012, mining harms and repression linked to Tahoe Resources and Pan American Silver
- CODIDENA: $1,500
- Xinka Parliament: $1,360
Campesino communities, western Honduras: Resisting, since early 2000s, mining harms and repression linked to Aura Minerals
- Azacualpa Environmental committee: $1,500
The Azacualpa Environmental Committee denounces that Aura Minerals is operating open-pit, cyanide leeching gold mine, risking further spread of Covid19, getting ever closer to destroying their 200 year old cemetery and village of Azacualpa, to get at gold beneath.
Mayan Q’eqchi’ communities, El Estor, eastern Guatemala: Resisting decades of harms and repression linked to Skye Resources and Hudbay Minerals, and now Solway Investment Group
- La Union community: $2,850
- Gremial union fisher people & campesinos: $900
- Political prisoner: $380
- Families, plaintiffs in landmark Hudbay Minerals lawsuits: $3,000
- Lote 8 / Cahoboncito communities: $2,680
Angelica Choc , Ramiro Choc and family and community members are spear-heading ‘food sovereignty’ community and family gardens. Angelica is the widow of Adolfo Ich, murdered by Hudbay Minerals’ security guards in Guatemala in 2009, and one of 13 plaintiffs in the landmark Hudbay Minerals lawsuits in Canada. Ramiro is a widely respected land, environment and indigenous rights defender who was illegally jailed as a political prisoner (2008-2014) for his education, organizing and activism work.
Community food kitchen, Guatemala City: $400
Patutul community response: $550
Guatemala City human rights defenders: $1,200
Lenca descendant communities, western Honduras, & Berta Caceres family members: Resisting harms and repression caused by “development” projects, justice for Berta assassination
- CIPPH: $2,600
- Berta Caceres’ family: $1,000
Solidarity is the virus that capitalism fears. Re-weave our networks. Organize your community, neighborhood. Mutual support. Community kitchens.
Campesino communities, central Honduras: Suffering on-going health harms in 2020 linked to Goldcorp’s mine, 2000-2008
- Community response: $1,500
Peru: Kukama women’s federation, Iquitos: $500
El Salvador: Jocoaitique historical memory committee, Morazan: $2,100
In Morazan, north-east El Salvador, the Jocoaitique committee supports impoverished campesinos, many – like this man – being veterans of El Salvador’s revolutionary war against the U.S. backed military dictatorships of the 1970s-1980s.
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Rights Action will continue to support these, and other community based groups, as best we can, in their on-going Covid response work and as they continue with territorial, human rights and environmental defense struggles.
The solution to Covid19, as with so many injustices, violence and inequalities plaguing the lives of so many humans, is NOT “to go back to normal”.
The solution is for people, communities and governments working together to create societies and a global community based on full respect and protection for the ‘mother earth’, the environment and all life forms, and 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, work for.
Thank-you
Grahame Russell, Rights Action
[email protected]
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