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December 16, 2025
See where your donations go
End of Year Funding Summary - December 2025
https://mailchi.mp/rightsaction/see-where-your-donations-go
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As of December 1, 2025, Rights Action has sent over $220,000 to community-led work and struggle (mainly in Guatemala and Honduras) confronting and resisting the cocktail of exploitation and repression, corruption and impunity that often characterize policies, actions and investments of U.S., Canadian E.U. governments, global companies, banks and investors, invariably in partnerships with local wealthy elites and partner groups.
This is the third and final part to our end-of-year series.
Read the first two here:
For more info, or if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch: [email protected].
All the best,
Your friends at Rights Action
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GUATEMALA
Community defense struggles
- Ancestral Council Q’eqchi’ Peoples: Land and rights defenders resisting harms and violence linked to African palm production and nickel mining in El Estor region
- 54 Maya Q’eqchi’ communities: Resistance to Montreal-based Central America Nickel company, including support for family of land defender killed
- CODIDENA: Xinka and campesino communities still resisting widely rejected mining interests of Canadian company Pan American Silver (formerly Tahoe Resources)
- La Puya encampment: Maya Quiche, Xinka and campesino communities still resisting mining interests of KCA (Kappes Cassiday & Associates) trying to force a “community consultation” while simultaneously extorting Guatemalan government for $400 million in “lost potential earnings” through so-called “international dispute resolution tribunals” based in World Bank
- Aftermath of Hudbay Minerals lawsuits
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Rabinal Maya Achi Legal Clinic
- Legal work on Maya Achi women’s sexual assault and slavery case dating from U.S. and Western-backed genocides and repression of the 1970s-80s
- Los Encuentros massacre commemorative chapel
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Family members of victims of the May 14, 1982 “Los Encuentros” massacre prepare the ground up the mountain side from where the massacre occurred. It was one of four massacres committed in 1982 that left over 450 Rio Negro Maya Achi villagers slaughtered, to make way for the Chixoy hydro-electric dam investment project of the World Bank and IDB in partnership with the genocidal regimes of Generals Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt, 1975-1985.
Rights Action is helping raise funds for a chapel and place of reflection to be built here, for surviving family and community members to gather, honor and communicate with their loved ones, lost to the Chixoy dam “development” project, during the height of the Maya Achi genocide.
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FAMDEGUA (Family Members of Detained and Disappeared)
Still fighting multiple legal cases in Guatemala’s corrupted legal system, for crimes against humanity committed during worst years of U.S. and Western-backed genocides and repression, 1970s-80s
Community Development Projects
- Rio Negro community center/museum and development projects, in Maya Achi village destroyed by massacres in 1980s to make way for Chixoy dam project
- ACPC (Association of Community Production): Xesiguan watershed defense, agro-ecology project in Maya Achi villages of Rabinal
Emergencies
- Carlos Chen: health support, Maya Achi eye-witness to and survivor of Rio Negro/Chixoy dam massacres
- Juan Martin: long-time driver and support person for Rights Action’s educational delegations
- San Cristobal Verapaz: health support, community defender
- Maya Q’eqchi’ land defender: health emergency
Emergencies: lawfare, criminalizations, political prisoners, exile
- Ramon Cadena: jurist and human rights lawyer, jailed, now on “home arrest”
- Miguel Angel Galvez: judge, forced into exile
- Children of Rio Negro massacre survivors: forced to migrate
- Luis Pacheco: Maya Quiche leader from Totonicapan and Deputy Minister of Sustainable Development (Ministry of Mines and Energy), now a political prisoner with Hector Chaclan
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“We reject criminalizations and persecution of justice and democracy defenders in Guatemala”
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Truth, Memory
- Commemorations: four 1982 Chixoy dam massacres of Maya Achi Rio Negro villagers
- Commemoration: Panzos massacre of Maya Q’eqchi’ land defenders, May 1982
- Estamos Aqui: bicycle caravan, children of disappeared Guatemalans
Investigation, Reporting
- Carlos Ernesto, Maya Q’eqchi’ community journalist
- Communicate: presentation of documentaries in Peru
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HONDURAS
- Bajo Aguan land and rights defense: Support, in collaboration with HSN, for community defenders devastated by violence and corruption of African palm exporters, mining, narco-traffickers
- Berta Caceres family: Support and well-being of Berta’s mother
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COPINH ((Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras), co-founded by Berta Caceres in 1993, continues courageous work in defense of political, economic, social, and cultural rights of Indigenous peoples, especially Lenca people of Western Honduras.
Led by Berta’s daughters, COPINH continues to demand justice for “intellectual” authors of her March 2, 2016 assassination, allegedly members of oligarchic Atala Zablah family that ordered and paid for her killing.
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- OFRANEH: Defense of lands and rights of Garifuna, afro-descendant indigenous people, resisting onslaught of North American tourism investors
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Across the north shore of Honduras, tourism investment projects offer a “slice of paradise” to mainly North American investors, all contributing to ‘waterfront plot by waterfront plot’ ethnocide of the Garifuna Indigenous people, often using corruption and violence to wrest lands from villagers and communities.
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OTHER COUNTRIES
- Argentina: Committee to Free Milagro Sala and other political prisoners
- Mexico: Ojala on-line news about human rights and politics in Latin America
- Panama: health, housing support for advocate for justice for victims of 1989 U.S. invasion
- El Salvador: Herbert Anaya Human Rights Collective
- Canada: support for criminalized international human rights and justice defenders
EDUCATION
- 13 Brave Giants: report on “how we won the landmark Hudbay Minerals lawsuits and Mynor Padilla trial, and at what cost!”
- Human rights education delegations: UNBC-Rights Action May 2025, “Geographies of Culture, Rights & Power: The Global Order, Injustice and Resistance in Guatemala”
- Work with media, professors and educators investigating and reporting on issues Rights Action addresses
- Independent journalists: Michael Fox & Jared Olsen
- Participation in education/activist forums in U.S. and Canada
- Regular publishing via listserv, newsletter and social media
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Tax-Deductible Donations (Canada & U.S.)
To support land and environmental defenders, and human rights, justice and democracy struggles in Honduras and Guatemala, make check to "Rights Action" and mail to:
- U.S.: Box 50887, Washington DC, 20091-0887
- Canada: Box 82858, RPO Cabbagetown Toronto, ON, M5A 3Y2
Credit-Card Donations: https://rightsaction.org/donate/
Direct deposits, write to: [email protected]
Donations of securities, write to: [email protected]
Change media sources
Rights Action urges everyone to diversify their news sources, as a necessary antidote to the oftentimes harmful, misleading reporting coming from much of the government and corporate media in the U.S., the E.U. and Canada. We recommend Democracy Now, The Real News, Al Jazeera News (for coverage of Genocide in Palestine), The Gray Zone, The Orinoco Tribune...
13 BRAVE GIANTS
How We Won the Landmark Hudbay Minerals Lawsuits in Canada and the Mynor Padilla Criminal Trial in Guatemala, and at What Cost!
By Grahame Russell, Rights Action, 2025
TESTIMONIO
Canadian Mining in the Aftermath of Genocides in Guatemala
Edited by Catherine Nolin & Grahame Russell , Between The Lines, 2021
More info: [email protected], www.rightsaction.org
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