SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
guatemala
'Justice Has Failed Us Here in Guatemala': A Family Fights for Accountability
More than 44 years have now passed since Guatemalan state forces abducted Luz Leticia; every day since, her sisters have fought to preserve the truth and dignity of her life while demanding answers.
Jul 12, 2026
Under the beating sun on the morning of June 21, Mirtala del Rosario Hernández Agustín joins families of the disappeared and members of organizations including the Association of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared in Guatemala, or FAMDEGUA, and Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence, or HIJOS, in Guatemala City’s Plaza de la Constitución to commemorate the National Day Against Enforced Disappearances.
“We dream of a different Guatemala, and we fight for it. We cannot sit back and cross our arms. We have a person detained and disappeared.” Mirtala’s voice carries across the plaza. Behind her sit more than 400 empty chairs, each bearing the portrait of someone forcibly disappeared during Guatemala’s 36-year internal armed conflict. “I am the sister of Luz Leticia Hernández Agustín,” she continues. “To have peace in my heart, to be able to say we’ve been heard, we need my sister's remains returned.”
More than 44 years have now passed since Guatemalan state forces abducted Luz Leticia on November 22, 1982. It was her 25th birthday. And it was the last time she was seen.
Yet her sisters, Marta and Mirtala, refused to let her vanish completely. Every day since, they have fought to preserve the truth and dignity of Luz Leticia’s life while demanding answers not only for her, but for the tens of thousands who were disappeared, tortured, and killed during Guatemala’s US-backed campaign of state terror and genocide.
No amount of political power can permanently shield perpetrators from the demands for truth and justice made by the people they sought, and ultimately failed, to erase.
Now, their case is finally being heard in court. Three days a week, the Hernández Agustín sisters climb the stairs to the fifth floor of Guatemala City’s Palace of Justice. They sit through hours of testimony and legal argument, filling notebooks with observations and listening for the answers that have eluded their family for decades. Some days sting with the reopening of old wounds. Others dissolve into procedural delays, technical difficulties, and bureaucratic legal wrangling. They often leave frustrated and exhausted.
Still, they return. They do so because this case is about more than one family’s pursuit of justice. At a time when the United States is escalating violence at home and abroad, and governments like Guatemala’s continue to subordinate themselves to the imperatives of that long-standing imperial project, this trial carries particular significance. Most recently, this has included expanded military cooperation with Washington targeting alleged drug cartels in the country, a justification the US has invoked to extrajudicially kill more than 210 people over the past nine months.
The trial has therefore become a testament to all those who refused the silence imposed upon them. It is proof that those marked for erasure can reclaim their place in history. Above all, it is a reminder that no amount of political power can permanently shield perpetrators from the demands for truth and justice made by the people they sought, and ultimately failed, to erase.
The Long Shadow of Empire in Guatemala
The Guatemala into which the Hernández Agustín sisters were born bore the unmistakable imprint of empire. It was a country of staggering inequality, where generations inherited the desiccated remains of a nation picked clean by the vultures of foreign capital. The promise of reform had long since been extinguished. Gone was the Democratic Spring, the brief decade from 1944 to 1954 when popularly elected governments sought to expand democracy and direct the country’s wealth toward its people rather than multinational corporations and the landed oligarchy.
That dream was crushed with the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz. The coup sought not simply to remove a government but to restore the deeply unequal social order whose foundations had been laid under the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. A pliant strongman who willingly auctioned off his country’s future to the highest bidder, Ubico granted sweeping concessions to US corporations while enriching himself. Under his rule, the Boston-based United Fruit Company became Guatemala’s largest landholder, acquiring more than 40% of its arable land and near-monopolistic control over not only its lucrative banana exports but also critical infrastructure, including the country's railroads and electrical network.
The threat posed by the Democratic Spring was not simply that it had challenged landowners and foreign corporations. It had shown workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities that collective action could transform society.
Ubico’s regime collapsed in 1944 with a popular uprising. Under elected Presidents Juan José Arévalo and then Árbenz, Guatemala embarked on an ambitious reform program. Building on Arévalo’s efforts, Árbenz expanded labor protections, social security, and universal suffrage while pursuing economic modernization that sought to transform Guatemala from what he referred to as “a semi-colonial dependency into an independent nation” and “a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.”
It was this challenge to entrenched economic power that placed Árbenz in the crosshairs of both Washington and Wall Street. The flash point was Decree 900, his sweeping agrarian reform. The measure authorized the expropriation of uncultivated large estates, including United Fruit’s vast holdings, for redistribution to hundreds of thousands of peasants. Remuneration would be based on the value the company itself had declared, a figure it had deliberately undervalued to reduce its tax burden. While the reform was rooted in economic nationalism and guaranteed compensation for the land, officials in Washington cast it as evidence of communist subversion.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles, both closely tied to United Fruit, orchestrated Árbenz’s overthrow. The coup ended Guatemala’s democratic experiment and ushered in decades of military rule, repression, and civil war.
A State Built on Terror
The dictatorship that emerged in the wake of the coup gave rise to a popular insurgency determined to reclaim the democratic aspirations that had been violently swept aside. It also ushered in a new era of repression. For Guatemala’s military rulers, the objective was to preserve their power. For their patrons in Washington, Guatemala became a Cold War proving ground, meant to demonstrate the consequences of challenging US political and economic power.
The threat posed by the Democratic Spring was not simply that it had challenged landowners and foreign corporations. It had shown workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities that collective action could transform society. That lesson had to be unlearned. In its place, they sought to teach another: that any attempt to remake Guatemala would be met with overwhelming violence. Terror became the principal pedagogy of the state.
From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala’s internal armed conflict claimed roughly 200,000 lives and left another 45,000 disappeared.
Repression failed to extinguish resistance. In 1960, dissident military officers launched an uprising against the regime. After it was crushed, many of its survivors retreated to the countryside, where they helped form the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), the first of several guerrilla organizations. The state responded with a brutal, US-backed counterinsurgency waged through roving death squads, systematic torture, forced disappearances, and indiscriminate targeting of suspected dissidents.
Rather than destroying the insurgency, the violence pushed it deeper into rural Guatemala, where Indigenous Maya communities and peasant organizers assumed an increasingly central role in new guerrilla organizations. By the late 1970s, the military had embraced a genocidal scorched-earth campaign, particularly against the Ixil Maya. Entire communities were treated as inherently subversive. The objective was no longer simply to defeat guerrillas but to destroy the social fabric that sustained Indigenous life.
Villages were razed. Thousands were massacred. Survivors were displaced or forced into tightly controlled “model villages” under a policy known as Palestinianization, where military authorities sought to erase Indigenous languages, traditions, religious practices, and communal life in the name of anti-communist pacification and national modernization.
From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala’s internal armed conflict claimed roughly 200,000 lives and left another 45,000 disappeared. The bloodiest paroxysm of violence came between 1981 and 1983, when security forces killed an estimated 100,000 people, overwhelmingly Indigenous Maya, in a genocidal campaign that journalist Vincent Bevins has referred to as “the largest bloodbath unleashed by the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere.” The atrocities unfolded with US training and the material and diplomatic backing of the Reagan administration, which viewed Guatemala as a critical front in its campaign against leftist movements across Latin America, alongside its support for the Contras in Nicaragua and allied security forces in El Salvador and Honduras.
The Disappearance of Luz Leticia
Luz Leticia Hernández Agustín, or Leti, as her sisters call her, was one of the many lives cut short by the Guatemalan state during this period of extreme violence. As the eldest sibling, she occupied an outsized place in her family’s life. Marta and Mirtala remember her as hardworking, intelligent, and deeply compassionate. In a household, and community, marked by intense economic precarity and hardship, she assumed responsibilities well beyond her years, helping care for her younger siblings and easing whatever burdens she could.
This experience shaped Leti’s politics. She came to understand that centuries of colonial conquest had produced enduring systems of racism, dispossession, and exploitation that were still being felt. “Leti could see all of that,” Marta explains. “All the deep-seated wrongs that have persisted for so long.” She imagined a different Guatemala, one where those structures no longer defined people's lives and where everyone, regardless of ethnicity or social standing, could live with dignity.
Leti’s sisters have never abandoned their search for truth and justice, nor their determination to affirm their sister’s existence.
Her commitment extended beyond her immediate family. As Mirtala recalled, Leti was motivated certainly “by her own experiences, and the way our parents lived,” but equally “by the suffering she witnessed among our people.” Despite all the evidence seemingly to the contrary, she never surrendered her belief that Guatemala could become a more just society. That conviction would draw her into the resistance. She joined Nuestro Movimiento (“Our Movement”), an underground organization affiliated with the Organization of People in Arms (ORPA).
In late 1982, Leti became involved in an effort to secure the release of a comrade, Ileana del Rosario Solares Castillo, who was illegally detained by the regime. On October 14, members of Nuestro Movimiento abducted Jorge Mario Ríos Muñoz, the nephew of General Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s de facto president who presided over the bloodiest phase of the genocide, for which he was convicted in 2013. The operation sought to force a prisoner exchange. Jorge Mario remained captive until November 21, when an intelligence unit, working alongside Israeli advisors, rescued him. In the process, Luz Leticia, Ana María López Rodríguez, María Cruz López Rodríguez, and Leandro Gabriel Calate Temu were all captured.
In that moment, Leti entered the opaque machinery of forced disappearance. She was taken into a clandestine detention system notorious for torture, sexual violence, and the systematic degradation of prisoners. Her family never saw or heard from her again.
The Struggle for Justice
Leti’s sisters have never abandoned their search for truth and justice, nor their determination to affirm their sister’s existence. In 2001, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) concluded that the Guatemalan state had violated the rights to life, liberty, humane treatment, judicial protection, and a fair trial of Ileana, Luz Leticia, and Ana María. It recommended that Guatemala locate the women’s remains, compensate their families, and identify and prosecute those responsible.
Five years later, the Guatemalan government offered the Hernández Agustín family an “amicable settlement agreement,” consisting of financial compensation without accountability and without the return of Luz Leticia's remains. They refused on principle.
In 2023, prosecutors indicted Juan Francisco Cifuentes Cano, the former commander of the National Police’s Fifth Corps Special Operations Reaction Battalion (BROE), on charges of crimes against humanity and enforced disappearance. After years of defense appeals aimed at delaying or derailing the proceedings, the long-awaited trial finally began on May 5.
Will we accept a world in which some have the right to kill and others the right to die, or insist on one governed by justice and accountability?
Justice, for them, means a broader reckoning with the collective trauma inflicted by enforced disappearance. The crime was designed to leave families trapped in cycles of hope and grief, producing what Marta described as the “strange sensation” that “[Leti] had died, yet was somehow still alive,” condemning them to “so much uncertainty, anxiety, and immense, constant stress.”
For Mirtala, that torment was central to the crime itself. “Enforced disappearance,” she explained, “is an act committed by the state against its own citizens, often in collusion with the very groups meant to guarantee the population's safety.” It extends far beyond the individual. “They don't just make the person disappear,” she said. “They do so in a way that instills terror and fear, and that is precisely what they have sought to do: to plunge us and our entire family into that terror.”
“It is a crime, an undeniable crime, but one committed in a sophisticated manner against our humanity,” she continued. The violence is directed not only at the disappeared but those left behind, condemning families to live with uncertainty while knowing their loved one is in the hands of the state. “It's agonizing to know that she's with these people.” “It’s powerlessness,” Mirtala said, “unable to do anything to pull [the disappeared] out of that cycle of violence and cruelty.”
Yet they have found meaning in the struggle. Their search for Leti has become inseparable from a broader fight over historical memory and for accountability. As Mirtala put it, it is a “story that reflects everything fractured in our country, all the underlying tensions and societal pain, and the struggles being waged on various fronts everywhere.”
Still, they approach that work with humility, believing that lasting change is built through small acts of collective resistance. “We are like an ant carrying a single grain of salt,” Mirtala explained. Yet she sees power even in the smallest acts. “This is how dust turns into sand, then into a gust of wind, and finally into a storm. We believe it will change many people’s perceptions.”
But this is not merely a struggle over memory. It is also a struggle over the present, over the ways impunity continues to shape Guatemala. In the decades since Leti’s disappearance, Guatemala has remained marked by stark inequality, corruption, violence, and rights abuses. The state continues to repress dissent, fueling recurring political crises rooted in its failure to meet the needs of its people. Mirtala sees in today’s situation the echoes of the violence that took her sister. “All these things,” she said, “they weigh on you, drop by drop, little by little.”
That is why pursuing Leti’s case has become about far more than one family’s search for justice. It is an act of resistance, a “vindication,” against a state that, as Mirtala put it, “has turned against its own people. Those who take power rob and take money from the people to enrich themselves" while the people “lack education, healthcare, food, and the chance for decent housing.” “To me,” she said, “it is a slap in the face, a punch to the gut of the state.”
The struggle has not been without risks. As documentary filmmaker Nancy Peckenham observed, “In Guatemala, to remember is dangerous.” Yet Mirtala and her sister remain resolute. “Sometimes I think about the risks,” Mirtala reflected, “but then I remember this isn’t just about asserting my sister’s rights. It is about the rights of thousands of people, both within Guatemala and abroad, because this is something suffered by all of us who lack power.”
Ultimately, she said, “that is what this has meant for us. It is a collective struggle.”
The case will continue through July. Its verdict will test not only Guatemala, but also whether we are doomed to live in a world, as the Trump administration architect of the United States’ ongoing nativist assault Stephen Miller put it, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Will we accept a world in which some have the right to kill and others the right to die, or insist on one governed by justice and accountability? The trial is one link in this broader struggle over whether a better world is possible: one free from the violence of impunity and imperialism, sustained by the conviction that those who commit atrocities will one day be held to account, from Guatemala to Venezuela, Palestine to Iran, and here in the United States.
All quotes from Marta and Mirtala Hernández Agustín are from a June 2026 speech and interview conducted by the authors and translated from Spanish.
Correction: The name of General Efraín Ríos Montt's nephew was Jorge Mario Ríos Muñoz, not Mario Ríos Montt. The piece has been updated to reflect this.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Guatemalan President Denies Deal With US for Joint Strikes on Drug Cartels
“There is no agreement authorizing foreign military operations by any country in national territory,” the office of President Bernardo Arévalo said in response to a New York Times report.
May 28, 2026
While acknowledging a request for US support in fighting drug cartels, Guatemala's president on Thursday refuted reporting by The New York Times claiming his government "has agreed to carry out joint strikes with the United States military inside its territory"—action that would violate the country's Constitution.
Citing "three people familiar with the talks," the Times reported that "President Bernardo Arévalo of Guatemala agreed to both airstrikes and other military action in a call with [US] Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth... with operations to start as early as next month."
However, Arévalo's office pushed back in a statement stressing that “there is no agreement authorizing foreign military operations by any country in national territory."
The presidential statement said that Guatemalan Defense Minister Henry Sáenz wrote to Hegseth "to request US cooperation in operations led by Guatemalan security forces against narco-trafficking organizations as part of a strategy launched in 2024."
"This request falls within the framework of existing bilateral agreements on the matter, and adheres to constitutional provisions and laws regarding cooperation agreements on civil and military security," the office added.
Arévalo's office stressed that Guatemala's Constitution stipulates that foreign military forces can only be deployed in the country if authorized by a two-thirds vote of the national Legislature.
A source from Arévalo's government told El País Thursday on condition of anonymity that the Trump administration has been exerting "great pressure" for two months.
“What they offered us is to select one or two places to bomb and televise everything," the source said. "But we have been clear that this is not going to happen. It cannot operate a US military force in the country, simply because it is unconstitutional."
Arévalo's office said it is seeking US assistance in training, strategic and tactical support, and intelligence sharing, pointing to recent actions against drug trafficking, including the capture of an arsenal in Las Cruces, Petén, the seizure of a narcotics laboratory in Ayutla, San Marcos, and the capture of numerous suspected narco-traffickers.
Asked during a Thursday press conference about the possibility of joint combat operations like those reportedly carried out by US and Ecuadorian forces in the South American nation, Arévalo claimed unfamiliarity with the details of the agreement between those two countries.
Progressive US lawmakers are demanding answers about “reports of serious human rights violations and the bombing of what appear to have been civilian facilities" in Ecuador, including a "dairy and cattle farm with no known links to armed groups or drug trafficking" where unarmed civilians were allegedly tortured.
Arévalo brushed off a suggestion that his request for US cooperation could open the door to human rights violations in Guatemala, telling reporters that "the best defense against any violation of human rights is our respect and commitment to the laws of the republic and to current legislation."
While Guatemala does suffer from serious narco-trafficking issues, many Guatemalans are wary of US intervention, given past meddling including the 1954 CIA-orchestrated overthrow of reformist President Jacobo Árbenz, which was followed by decades of right-wing repression, civil war, and a US-backed genocide against Indigenous Mayan peoples during which around 200,000 people were killed.
In March, the Trump administration lifted longstanding restrictions on arms transfers to Guatemala.
“Now, our soldiers are going to have access to modern technology, radars, night viewfinders," Sáenz told La Hora on Friday.
The defense minister said he discussed closer counter-narcotics cooperation with the United States during the “Shield of the Americas” summit, during which senior officials from over a dozen nations—most of them ruled by right-wing governments—gathered at President Donald Trump's golf resort near Miami.
In addition to Guatemala, the Trump administration has been trying to pressure other Latin American nations into launching joint military operations against narco-traffickers. President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has vehemently rejected US requests, even as President Donald Trump has threatened "to do something" about cartels in her country.
“The epicenter of cartel violence is not Mexico, it’s the United States,” Sheinbaum defiantly declared in March. “The cartels are fueled by the United States’ demand for drugs and armed with US weapons, and thanks to the United States, they are able to orchestrate enormous bloodshed and chaos throughout Latin America.”
In January, Trump ordered the bombing and invasion of Venezuela, whose president, Nicolás Maduro, was abducted to the United States on dubious "narco-terrorism" allegations that were then significantly walked back.
Trump has also threatened to attack Colombia, Panama, and Cuba, whose people are bracing for what many observers fear is an impending US war. If Trump does order military action against Cuba, it would be the 12th country he's attacked during the course of his two White House terms. Trump also ordered the ongoing bombing campaign targeting boats his administration claims—without providing evidence—were smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. Around 200 people have been killed by the US strikes.
As Nick Turse of The Intercept reported Wednesday:
Trump has turned the Western Hemisphere into a war zone as part of what he and others have called the Donroe Doctrine. This bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine has been used to justify strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean; an attack on Venezuela and the abduction of its president; CIA operations in Mexico; joint counter-cartel operations in Ecuador dubbed “Operation Total Extermination”; and increased military and intelligence operations elsewhere in Latin America.
Experts contend that, like the boat strikes, any airstrikes carried out against drug cartels would likely constitute illegal acts of murder, even if conducted with the permission of governments in targeted countries.
“As with the boat strikes, depending on the facts, further attacks could amount to premeditated killings outside of armed conflict, which some of us lawyers would refer to as murder,” former US State Department lawyer Brian Finucane told The New York Times on Thursday.
“Congress never authorized any of these strikes," he added. "So US personnel who participate in these actions could face consequences down the road, after the Trump administration.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
History Shows Why the US Must Leave Venezuela Alone
To fully understand Washington’s current warpath in the region, it’s necessary to revisit earlier episodes in which the US intervened, violently and anti-democratically, to shape the political destinies of countries in the hemisphere.
Dec 08, 2025
In recent months, the Trump administration has escalated a decades-long campaign against the Venezuelan government and people. The renewed, intensifying threats of regime change, justified through false or inflated claims that Nicolás Maduro, its president, is directing narco-terrorism against the United States, serve as a convenient pretext for deeper and more direct intervention.
A recent wave of extrajudicial killings at sea, the directing of the CIA to launch covert ops inside Venezuela, the surge of US troops into the Caribbean, the reopening of a long-shuttered naval base in Puerto Rico, and the deployment of the aircraft carrier the USS Gerald Ford in the region represent striking but not surprising developments. These are little more than the latest expression of an ideological project through which Washington has long sought to shape the hemisphere in ways that would entrench US power further and protect the profits of Western multinationals.
That formal project dates back to at least the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, when the US unilaterally claimed Latin America as its exclusive sphere of influence. Its revival today is unmistakable and distinctly dangerous. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared, echoing the language of that two-century-old policy, “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood, and we will protect it.”
The results of that doctrine have long been clear: immense profits for the few and violence, political upheaval, social dislocation, and economic devastation for the many. While Washington’s imperial desires in the hemisphere have long been met by movements challenging US dominance, these have repeatedly been forced back into the subordinate position assigned them in a global capitalist order designed to benefit their not so “good neighbor.”
When Hugo Chávez completed the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil sector in 2007, he followed a long and perilous trajectory established by regional leaders who dared to confront US power.
It’s no accident that, by the mid-1970s, Latin America had been transformed into a hemisphere dominated by US-backed right-wing authoritarian regimes. Entire regions like the Southern Cone became laboratories for repression, as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay formed a coordinated bloc of military juntas. With direct support from Washington, those regimes oversaw what came to be known as Operation Condor, establishing a transnational network of state terror. Its consequences were catastrophic: 50,000 killed, tens of thousands “disappeared,” and hundreds of thousands tortured and imprisoned for the so-called crime of harboring real or perceived leftist sympathies.
During that earlier period, Venezuela had been largely spared the brutal excesses of direct US interventionism in the region (due in part to the repressive rule of successive US-supported strongmen Juan Vicente Gómez and Marcos Pérez Jiménez). That changed in 1998, when Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s far more popular predecessor, became president and pursued policies of popular sovereignty and resource nationalism aimed at ensuring the nation’s vast oil reserves (the largest in the world) served Venezuelans rather than being siphoned off to enrich foreign corporations. From then on, Venezuela became the latest target of Washington’s efforts to undermine, discipline, and ultimately neutralize “troublesome” progressive governments across Latin America.
To fully understand Washington’s current warpath in the region, it’s necessary to revisit earlier episodes in which the US intervened, violently and anti-democratically, to shape the political destinies of countries in the hemisphere. Three cases are especially instructive: Cuba, Guatemala, and Chile. Together, they illuminate the long arc of US imperialism in Latin America and clarify the dangers of the present confrontation.
The Rise of Plattismo in Cuba
Cuba had long been a crown jewel in Washington’s imperial imagination. By 1823, American political elites were already casting the island as essential to the future of the United States. President John Quincy Adams, for instance, described Cuba, then a Spanish colony, as “indispensable” to the country’s “political and commercial interests.” He noted ominously that, should the island be “forcibly disjointed from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support,” it could “gravitate only towards the North American Union.” Thomas Jefferson similarly maintained that the possession of Cuba was “exactly what is wanting to round out our power as a nation.” In that spirit, during the 1840s and 1850s, Presidents James Polk and Franklin Pierce sought to purchase Cuba from Spain, overtures that were repeatedly rejected.
Those efforts unfolded during a period of rapid US territorial expansionism, marking a time when Washington regarded continental conquest as both a “providential destiny” and a political and economic imperative. When ostensibly legal mechanisms like land purchases could be invoked, they were embraced. When military force offered a more expedient path to territorial acquisition, as with the war of aggression that stripped Mexico of half its territory and delivered what became the American Southwest to US control in 1848, it was undertaken with little hesitation.
The opportunity to pursue longstanding ambitions in Cuba and inaugurate the US as an overseas empire arrived with the Spanish-American War of 1898. In that conflict, Washington intervened in anti-colonial uprisings from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, not to champion genuine liberation but to ensure that any subsequent “independence” would be subordinated to US strategic and economic interests. What emerged was a political order deliberately engineered to keep Cuba firmly tethered to the priorities and power of the United States.
That would be codified in the 1901 Platt Amendment, which effectively nullified Washington’s earlier assurances of Cuban sovereignty and granted Washington the right to establish military bases (including Guantánamo), substantial control over the Cuban treasury, and the ability to intervene whenever the US deemed it necessary to safeguard its arbitrarily defined notion of what constituted “Cuban independence” or to defend “life, property, and individual liberty.”
In practice, Cuba emerged from the war as a dependent protectorate, not a sovereign nation. That model was soon codified for the entire hemisphere with the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine issued in 1904, which granted the United States a self-appointed mandate to police the region to maintain “order.”
In Cuba, that arrangement would serve Washington’s interests for decades. By 1959, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, US corporations controlled 90% of the island’s trade, 90% of its public services, 75% of its arable land, and 40% of its sugar industry. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Cubans remained landless, disenfranchised, and mired in poverty.
By breeding staggering inequality, Washington’s imperialism rendered Cuba ripe for revolution. In 1959, following years in exile, Fidel Castro returned to the island to overwhelmingly popular support, having launched an armed struggle after attempting to run in the 1952 elections that the Washington-backed Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista cancelled. Rather than confront the policies that had produced the revolution, US officials moved to make an example of Castro, waging an obsessive campaign to undermine his revolutionary government and punish the population whose support had made his ascent possible.
Washington pursued everything from ill-fated invasions to assassinations, plots that, in October 1962, brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. It also imposed a punishing economic blockade designed to choke the island’s economy, render socialism a stillbirth, and deter other nations from challenging US hegemony. Those efforts foreclosed the possibility of constructive engagement, which Castro had initially signaled he was open to, pushing Cuba decisively into the Soviet orbit, and creating the very outcome Washington claimed it had sought to avoid.
The Fall of Guatemala
Castro did not return to Cuba alone. He arrived alongside the Argentinian Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who would become a key ideologue of the revolution, bringing with him a commitment to constructing a global, anti-imperialist movement. The two first met in 1955 in Mexico City, where Castro was organizing in exile and Guevara had resettled after working as a doctor in Guatemala, a country he had entered to support the democratic spring of President Jacobo Árbenz.
The democratic experiment in Guatemala was abruptly and violently extinguished in 1954, when a US-backed coup toppled Árbenz. From that experience, Guevara carried with him an indelible lesson about the reach of US power and Washington’s willingness to deploy force in defense of corporate interests, along with the profoundly antidemocratic and destabilizing consequences of US intervention across the hemisphere.
That coup in Guatemala was carried out in service to that country’s real center of authority, the Boston-based United Fruit Company. Founded in 1899, United Fruit consolidated its foothold there through a series of preferential corporate arrangements, as successive strongmen ceded vast tracts of land and critical infrastructure to the company in exchange for personal enrichment. In the process, Guatemala was transformed into the archetypal “banana republic.”
If Guatemala exposed Washington’s readiness to destroy a modest social democracy in the name of communism and in defense of corporate power, Chile demonstrated the full, violent maturation of unrepentant Cold War interventionism.
United Fruit came to dominate Guatemala’s agricultural and industrial sectors, transforming itself into one of the most profitable corporations in the world. It secured extraordinary returns through its monopoly power, wage suppression, and the criminalization of labor organizing. Its influence extended into the highest levels of Washington. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had represented United Fruit as a senior partner at the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, had previously served on that company’s board.
Árbenz regarded United Fruit not just as a threat to Guatemala’s sovereignty but also as an engine of injustice. In a country where 2% of the landholders controlled 72% of all arable land (more than half controlled by United Fruit), much of it left deliberately fallow, he sought to challenge a system that denied millions of peasants access to the land on which their survival depended. His land reform program applied only to uncultivated land. The government proposed purchasing idle tracts at their declared tax value (based on the company’s own assessments). Yet because United Fruit had systematically undervalued its vast land holdings to evade taxes, the company refused.
Árbenz’s policies, driven by the fact that he was a nationalist (not a communist), were committed to dismantling Guatemala’s imperial dependency. His objective was to transform, as he put it, “Guatemala from a country bound by a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state, and to make this transformation in a way that will raise the standard of living of the great mass of our people to the highest level.” Yet, in the ideologically charged climate of the early Cold War years, such New Deal-style reforms were recast by Washington as incontrovertible proof that a “Soviet beachhead” was taking root in Central America.
By 1954, US officials insisted that they had “no choice” but to intervene to prevent the country from “falling” to communism. The subsequent coup relied on an orchestrated propaganda campaign, the financing of a mercenary army, and the aerial bombardment of Guatemala City. The combined pressure of all of that coerced Árbenz into resigning. In his final address, he condemned the attacks “as an act of vengeance by the United Fruit Company” and stepped down in the hope, quickly dashed, that his departure might preserve his reforms.
Power would soon be transferred to the military regime of Carlos Castillo Armas, while US President Dwight D. Eisenhower triumphantly proclaimed that “the people of Guatemala, in a magnificent effort, have liberated themselves from the shackles of international Communist direction.” In reality, United Fruit had expanded its influence, while the country descended into decades of state terror. The civil war that followed claimed more than 200,000 lives, including a genocidal campaign against the Indigenous Ixil Maya people, carried out with direct US support.
The Crushing of Chilean Socialism
If Guatemala exposed Washington’s readiness to destroy a modest social democracy in the name of communism and in defense of corporate power, Chile demonstrated the full, violent maturation of unrepentant Cold War interventionism. When the socialist physician Salvador Allende won the presidency in 1970 in a democratic election, Washington immediately went on the warpath, launching a covert, sustained campaign to strangle his government before it could succeed.
Allende sought to expand social welfare and democratize the economy. His program called for the nationalization of strategic industries, the expansion of healthcare and education, the strengthening of organized labor, and the dismantling of entrenched monopolistic landholdings. Those initiatives drew support from a broad, multiparty alliance rooted in Chile’s peasants as well as its working and middle classes. Above all, Allende’s agenda aimed to reclaim the nation’s mineral wealth from foreign capital, especially the US-based copper giant Anaconda, whose staggering profits bore few meaningful returns for the Chilean population.
President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger found that intolerable and quickly came to regard Allende not just as a symbolic but a real threat to US power in the region. After all, a successful socialist state achieved through the ballot box risked demonstrating that another political and economic path was indeed possible.
What followed was a coordinated campaign of economic, social, and political destabilization. The CIA funneled millions to Chile’s opposition parties, business associations, and media outlets. It financed strikes and disruptions designed to create and weaponize scarcity, to (in Nixon’s words) “make the economy scream” and erode confidence in Allende’s Popular Unity government. US officials also cultivated ties with reactionary factions in the Chilean military, encouraging coup plots and ultimately directly supporting the overthrow of Allende on September 11, 1973.
What emerged was one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the hemisphere in the 20th century. General Augusto Pinochet’s regime would carry out widespread torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings, while US-trained economists imposed radical neoliberal policies (similar to the failed ones now being implemented by Javier Milei in Argentina with the help of a Donald Trump bailout) that dismantled social protections and opened Chile’s economy to foreign capital.
Hands Off Venezuela
In every instance where the United States intervened in Latin America, leaving tens of thousands dead and entire societies destabilized, it was never really communism that Washington feared. What alarmed policymakers and the corporate interests they served was the prospect that nations in the hemisphere might escape the economic architecture of US dominance.
When Hugo Chávez completed the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil sector in 2007, he followed a long and perilous trajectory established by regional leaders who dared to confront US power. In doing so, they committed what Washington considered the “cardinal sin” of asserting sovereign control over national resources within a hemisphere it had long treated as its strategic preserve. These leaders demonstrated, however briefly, that it was possible to stand up to the United States, but that such defiance would ultimately be met with overwhelming force.
Independent powers in this hemisphere going their own way were the threat that Washington and Wall Street could never tolerate. It’s the same reason the United States is once again maneuvering toward open conflict in Venezuela. To proceed down such a path will, of course, mean reenacting some of the most catastrophic chapters of US foreign policy. The lesson of such imperial adventurism in Latin America is unmistakable. When Washington interferes in other nations, the outcome is never stability or democracy but their absolute negation.
Keep ReadingShow Less
At Least 146 Killed or Disappeared for 'Defending Life Itself' Last Year
"It is critical that governments and companies turn the tide to uphold defenders’ rights and protect them rather than persecute them," said the lead author of the new Global Witness report.
Sep 17, 2025
At least 142 people were killed and four were confirmed missing last year for "bravely speaking out or taking action to defend their rights to land and a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment," according to an annual Global Witness report published Wednesday.
"Year after year, land and environmental defenders—those protecting our forests, rivers, and lands across the world—continue to be met with unspeakable violence," said Laura Furones, the report's lead author, in a statement. "They are being hunted, harassed, and killed—not for breaking laws, but for defending life itself."
"Standing up to injustice should never be a death sentence," Furones declared. "It is critical that governments and companies turn the tide to uphold defenders' rights and protect them rather than persecute them. We desperately need defenders to keep our planet safe. If we turn our backs on them, we forfeit our future."
The report, Roots of Resistance, begins by listing the activists who were murdered or disappeared for six months or more in 2024. It also says: "We acknowledge that the names of many defenders who were killed or disappeared last year may be missing, and we may never know how many more gave their lives to protect our planet. We honor their work too."
The most dangerous country for environmental defenders, by far, was Colombia, with 48 deaths. Jani Silva, a defender there living under state protection, said that "as this report shows, the vast majority of defenders under attack are not defenders by choice—including myself. We are defenders because our homes, land, communities, and lives are under threat. So much more must be done to ensure communities have rights and that those who stand up for them are protected."
Colombia was followed by Guatemala (20), Mexico (18), Brazil (12), the Philippines (7), Honduras (5), Indonesia (5), Nicaragua (4), Peru (4), the Democratic Republic of Congo (4), Ecuador (3), and Liberia (3). There was one confirmed killing each in Russia, India, Venezuela, Argentina, Madagascar, Turkey, Cameroon, Cambodia, and the Dominican Republic. The four disappearances were in Chile, Honduras, Mexico, and the Philippines.
"This brings the total figure to 2,253 since we started reporting on attacks in 2012. This appalling statistic illustrates the persistent nature of violence against defenders," the report states. It stresses that while the new figure is lower than the 196 cases in 2023, "this does not indicate that the situation for defenders is improving."
The report notes that "120 (82%) of all the cases we documented in 2024 took place in Latin America," while 16 killings occurred in Asia and nine were in Africa. It emphasizes that "underreporting remains an issue globally, particularly across Asia and Africa. Obstacles to verify suspected violations also present a problem, particularly documenting cases in active conflict zones."
A third of all land and environmental defenders killed or disappeared last year were Indigenous. The deadliest industry was mining and extractives, at 29, followed by logging (8), agribusiness (4), roads and infrastructure (2), hydropower (1), and poaching.
In addition to detailing who was killed or disappeared, what they fought for, and how "the current system is failing defenders," the report offers recommendations for "how states and businesses can better protect defenders."
Currently, said Global Witness project lead Rachel Cox, "states across the world are weaponizing their legal systems to silence those speaking out in defense of our planet."
"Amid rampant resource use, escalating environmental pressure, and a rapidly closing window to limit warming to 1.5°C, they are treating land and environmental defenders like they are a major inconvenience instead of canaries in a coal mine about to explode," she continued.
"Meanwhile, governments are failing to hold those responsible for defender attacks to account—spurring the cycle of killings with little consequence," she added. "World leaders must acknowledge the role they must play in ending this once and for all."
The recommendation section specifically points to the upcoming United Nations climate summit, COP30, in Belém, Brazil, "a city amid one of the world's most biodiverse regions—and one of the most dangerous countries to be a land and the environment defender."
"The protection and meaningful participation of land and environmental defenders at COP30 and beyond is an essential element of the fight against climate change," the document says. "It must become a core principle of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity process."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Just Tried to Illegally Deport 600+ Guatemalan Kids on Holiday Weekend
"It is a dark and dangerous moment for this country when our government chooses to target orphaned 10-year-olds and denies them their most basic legal right to present their case before an immigration judge," a lawyer said.
Aug 31, 2025
In an effort reminiscent of US President Donald Trump using the Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds of migrants to a Salvadoran prison, his administration just tried to deport more than 600 unaccompanied children to Guatemala over Labor Day weekend—though for now, a federal judge's order appears to have halted the plan, unlike last time.
CNN exclusively reported Friday morning that the Trump administration was "moving to repatriate hundreds of Guatemalan children" who arrived in the United States alone and were placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Subsequent reporting confirmed plans to deport the kids, who are ages 10-17.
Fearing their imminent removal after the administration reportedly reached an agreement with the Guatemalan government, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) launched a class action lawsuit around 1:00 am Sunday, seeking an emergency order that was granted just hours later by a federal judge in Washington, D.C.
"Plaintiffs have active proceedings before immigration courts across the country, yet defendants plan to remove them in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Constitution," NILC's complaint explains.
Efrén C. Olivares, vice president of litigation and legal strategy at the NILC, said that "it is a dark and dangerous moment for this country when our government chooses to target orphaned 10-year-olds and denies them their most basic legal right to present their case before an immigration judge."
"The Constitution and federal laws provide robust protections to unaccompanied minors specifically because of the unique risks they face," Olivares noted. "We are determined to use every legal tool at our disposal to force the administration to respect the law and not send any child to danger."
Politico's Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein reported on the judge's moves:
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan issued the order just after 4:00 am Sunday, finding that the "exigent circumstances" described in the lawsuit warranted immediate action "to maintain the status quo until a hearing can be set."
The judge, a Biden appointee, initially scheduled a virtual hearing on the matter for 3:00 pm Sunday, but later moved up the hearing to 12:30 pm after being notified that some minors covered by the suit were "in the process of being removed from the United States."
Sharing updates from the hearing on social media, Cheney reported that Sooknanan took a five-minute recess so that US Department of Justice attorney Drew Ensign could ensure that the details of her order reached the Trump administration—which is pursuing mass deportations. Ensign confirmed to the judge that while it's possible one plane took off and then returned, all the children are still in the United States.
Following the judge's intervention, NILC's Olivares said in a statement that "in the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala."
"We are heartened the court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm," he added. "We are determined to continue fighting to protect the interest of our plaintiffs and all class members until the effort is enjoined permanently."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Cowards': Ramirez Hits Back at Republicans Who Threatened Her With Deportation
"We will continue to stand up for our rights, and we will continue to call out the terrorist organization that is ICE," the congresswoman said in a speech at Netroots Nation.
Aug 08, 2025
Facing threats from Republicans who have called for her deportation this week, U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez has refused to back down.
The progressive Guatemalan-American congresswoman from Illinois has become a punching bag in right-wing media this week after comments she made in Spanish were apparently mistranslated by The Blaze, which claimed she said: "I'm a proud Guatemalan, before I'm an American."
It was quickly revealed that the Democrat had, in fact, said she was "very proudly Guatemalan," but "First, I am American."
But this did not stop Republican officials—including Reps. Andy Ogles (Tenn.) and Byron Donalds (Fla.); Trump border czar Tom Homan; and even the official social media account for the Department of Homeland Security, from threatening to strip Ramirez—who is a U.S.-born citizen—of her citizenship and throw her out of the country.
In her first public appearance since the attacks began, at the annual progressive gathering Netroots Nation in New Orleans, Ramirez was defiant.
In an interview with Emily Topping for Current Affairs magazine, she called the three men who attacked her "cowards."
Of Ogles, who said Ramirez should be kicked off the House Homeland Security Committee, she said, "This is a man that wants to talk about 'oath of office' but violates it every single day."
"I was born in this country just like he was," she added, "and therefore calling for me to be denaturalized and deported is not constitutional, and it's illegal."
She accused Donalds—who said he "never had a chance to meet Ramirez"—of being too afraid to face her directly: "If you don't know me, why are you talking about me? Why don't you pick up the phone and ask me what I think?"
"Because I show up to Congress," she said. "I show up every single week defending Medicaid, Social Security, education, collective bargaining, and the Constitution, something that perhaps he should think about instead of attacking a colleague on Twitter."
The congresswoman said her other Republican attackers were using her as a distraction from the mounting inquiry into President Donald Trump's involvement with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
"They don't want you to think about the Epstein files and how their number one job is to protect the pedophile and not protect the American people," Ramirez said. "But I think this is the moment we are living in."
In a keynote speech at the Netroots conference Thursday evening, Ramirez addressed that moment with ferocity.
She called out Homan, who has complained that the immigrants in Ramirez's hometown of Chicago are "very difficult" for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to arrest because they are "educated" about their rights.
"He hopes that we don't know our rights so they can violate them," Ramirez said. "We will continue to stand up for our rights, and we will continue to call out the terrorist organization that is ICE."
Video: Netroots Nation
Attacks on immigrants were just one prong of what she called "the Trump administration's heartless, inhumane, brutal campaign of control all around us."
She said Israel's war on Gaza, which she later described as a "genocide," is also part of this campaign, as are the administration's attacks on transgender people, the homeless, unionized workers, and safety net programs like Medicaid.
"Their campaigns of starvation, displacement, and death, at home and abroad, are meant to break us," she said. "They want our resources. They want our land. They want our freedoms. They want our lives so that they can advance their imperialist authoritarian agendas across the world."
In June, Ramirez led a group of 18 congresspeople who introduced the Block the Bombs Act, which would restrict the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel.
In May, she also introduced the Born in the USA Act, which asserts that the 14th Amendment unequivocally grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States, and declares any attempts to restrict birthright citizenship unconstitutional.
Though neither bill has passed out of the Republican-controlled House and restrictions on weapons sales to Israel have struggled to receive even Democratic support, Ramirez said she still feels cause for optimism—despite what she called "dark times"—by looking at the future she hopes to build.
"It is not enough to simply protect the rights and freedoms we have now," she said. "We will create a future in which working people have every single damn thing they deserve and more."
She spoke of renewing the push for Medicare and housing for all, the Green New Deal, and an increased minimum wage. She also previewed a piece of legislation she plans to introduce in September that would increase taxes on the rich.
"In a time where they attempt to silence us, where they attempt to paralyze us, may we never normalize this moment," she said. "Yes, war is destruction, but we are creation people in a creation movement, and we are building forward."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Guatemalan Women Fought for Democracy. Now They Have to Make It Work for Them.
A historic grassroots mobilization stopped the nation's corrupt elites from consolidating authoritarian rule in what could have spelled the demise of democracy in Guatemala. The women who led that movement have no illusions about the challenges ahead.
Sep 15, 2024
Outside the window, a storm gathers over Lake Atitlan. Inside, more than 50 women activists, including Guatemalan indigenous land defenders, international feminist leaders and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, listen attentively. Mayan ancestral authorities are telling the deep story of how a recent popular uprising mobilized by indigenous organizations held on for 106 days, defying one of the world’s most corrupt and tyrannic elites who were attempting to override the election results.
The triumph of the Guatemalan people’s movement in defense of democracy is all the more extraordinary because it was led by Indigenous peoples, youth, women, workers, urban poor—those who’ve been ignored and oppressed for centuries by the neocolonialist powers they now defeated at the polls.
Luz Emilia Ulario, ancestral leader of Santa Lucía Utatlán, summed up the moment: “We grew up in this racist, discriminatory system. It hasn’t just been 106 days--it’s been more than 532 years that we’ve been resisting. Those 106 days are when we all rose up together, we all spoke out to say what we think. We shed our fear. It was really the culmination of the 532 years.”
Ulario is one of many women ancestral authorities and indigenous community leaders who traveled to the lakeside village of Panajachel to meet with the international delegation “Women for Peace and Democracy,” organized by the Nobel Women’s Initiative of Peace Prize laureates; JASS, an international feminist movement building organization that supports women’s organizing and movements; and the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation.
Defending representative democracy was not the obvious battle for Guatemalan indigenous peoples, and especially indigenous women, in a system rigged to exclude them.
The mobilization began after Bernardo Arevalo, the son of a former president and candidate of a relatively new and small party called Semilla, unexpectedly beat the candidate of the ruling elite, Sandra Torres. The Pact of the Corrupt, as these elite interests are known, controls most courts, and had twisted the laws and regulations to eliminate candidates it considered a threat, but Arevalo flew in under their radar. His surprising first-round win, confirmed in the second round, sent the elites into a panic.
Led by Attorney General Consuelo Porras--sanctioned for corruption, obstruction of rule of law and anti-democratic acts by the United States, Canada and the European Union—corrupt judges and conservative members of Congress attempted to annul the elections, criminalize Arevalo and other party leaders, and block the transition of power. For years, this group of politicians and justice officials had been coopting democratic institutions in the legislative, executive and judicial branches and persecuting land and rights defenders. The historic grassroots mobilization stopped them from consolidating authoritarian rule in what could have spelled the demise of democracy in Guatemala.
Defense of democracy
In many ways, neither the electoral upset nor the mobilization was surprising. For decades Guatemalans had watched the slow strangulation of their fledgling democracy while the world paid little attention. There were moments of breakthrough hope, like the historic recognition of genocide against the Mayan people in the Rios Montt trial in 2013 (despite being later overturned by the court on procedural issues), the resignation and imprisonment on corruption charges of former president Otto Perez Molina following widespread protests, and charges leveled against corrupt officials by the UN International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala together with a small group of honest judges.
But mostly the hope resided in the people themselves, in the local acts of resistance—against attacks on basic freedoms, against extractivist projects that take their land and resources, against violence, and in defense of human rights and democracy.
Isabel Matzir, a leader of the community-based defense of the Cahabón River in Alta Verapaz against a hydroelectric project and partner of Bernardo Caal, Cahabón leader imprisoned for four years for defending the river, described this longstanding resistance:
In spite of the repression, corruption and impunity of part of the Guatemalan State, the Mayan people have resisted forever. Our values and principles motivate us to defender our mother earth, our territory, our collective rights, our natural goods and especially our life. We’ve developed a form of activism with deep conviction, even with the risk that we’ll be criminalized or killed.
Matzir addressed the Vice President, ministers and the international delegation. Perhaps for the first time in the nation’s history, the words of an indigenous woman activist were within the walls of the National Palace.
The 2023 protests united these daily acts and catalyzed broader resistance. The crack in the system that opened up when the Pact of the Corrupt lost the presidential election became a floodgate. Traditional forms of indigenous organization that evolved despite centuries of neocolonial rule provided the strategic and logistical backbone--and the moral authority--to convoke broad swaths of society sick of elite pilfering and repression. Alongside the demand to defend the vote, a deeper movement emerged that goes beyond party politics and challenges the pillars of colonialism and neoliberalism. Within this deeper movement, women shown as leaders and support systems, for sustaining the protests and the spark of hope for a better future.
This hope, at a time when authoritarian forces are gaining strength in other parts of the world, was what drew the international feminist delegation to Guatemala. Shereen Essof, executive director of Just Associates--an international organization that supports women’s organizations--placed it in a global context. “Democracy is under threat around the world. There has been a real erosion of democratic institutions by electoral processes, by cooptation of state mechanisms over the last years, so here today the defense of democracy led by indigenous peoples in Guatemala gives us hope. There are great opportunities, but we also know there are great threats in relation to the democratic transition.”
A centuries-old resistance
It’s impossible to understand Guatemala’s 106 days of resistance without taking into account the Indigenous power structures that have existed since before the Conquest and erupted into view during the mobilization. Forty-five percent of the Guatemalan population is Mayan according to official figures, probably more. The 1996 Peace Accords recognize four peoples—Maya, Xinca, Garifuna and Mestizo—in the country the largest being the Mayan. The Mayan population has won recognition of numerous “indigenous mayorships” made up of ancestral authorities throughout the country. These leaders issued the national call to action, organized on the local level and in regional associations, such as the 48 cantons of Totonicapán, which played a key role in the mobilization.
Without this organizational frame, the cross-sector protests could not have come together as quickly and as powerfully as they did. Patricia Ardon, Guatemalan activist who works in feminist popular education with JASS, attributes the ability to break through the racist context and organize a nationwide movement to the long history of indigenous resistance and organizing.
She writes, “Indigenous authorities—Guatemala’s formally recognized Indigenous Mayorships and those whose legitimacy stems from their history of service to their communities and ancestral practices—said ‘Enough is enough!’ and called on the people to mobilize. They marched to the capital city to stand in front of the office of the Public Ministry and demand the resignation of the Attorney General and respect for democracy, symbolized at this juncture by respect for the citizens’ vote.”
Mayan organizations were able to catalyze the movement because of the power and cohesion derived from centuries of conscious effort to preserve culture, historical memory, and territorial rootedness. The mobilization came to be called “the uprising of the ruling staffs.” Feliciana Herrera, Ixil leader and ancestral authority of Nebaj, explained: “The Ixil people have maintained our resistance, our identity, against the constant efforts to undermine us. We’ve maintained our language, our culture and our practices… There is power in the ruling staff—this staff is not just a stick, it is sacred to us because it’s a symbol, the insignia that listens to our problems, that listens to everything we seek to resolve.”
Whose Democracy?
The inauguration of the new president and vice president caused jubilation among the indigenous and citizen groups that mobilized, but they didn’t stop questioning the system itself or lose focus on ongoing issues of access to land and territory and basic human rights. Defending representative democracy was not the obvious battle for Guatemalan indigenous peoples, and especially indigenous women, in a system rigged to exclude them.
Luz Emilia explained, “Many people ask: Why do you defend democracy if everyone knows we don’t live in a democracy, we’re never taken into account? Because democracy is broad. For the government, it’s asking people to go out and vote, that’s democracy for them, then they forget about us in governing… and we’re back to being obedient and receiving what they say. We mounted this defense and we organized because the people have given this government a vote of confidence, we’re defending ourselves from going back to being a country run by a dictatorship.”
In a joint statement delivered to the new government during the delegation, 24 Guatemalan women’s organizations wrote: “In Guatemala, the recently elected progressive government presents a historic opportunity to deal with problems that women face and the impact these have on our communities… We celebrate our victories and the resistance of innumerable women who have struggled for profound change. As opportunities come up, we also prepare to face the challenges and ensure that our voices are heard.”
“Now we succeeded in defending our country, but we’re going to continue to organize to show that we are capable of defending our rights."
The women water and land defenders, persecuted judges and journalists, indigenous authorities, students, representatives of LGBTQ+ and Garifuna Afro-descendent communities told the delegation that the electoral victory is a window. They have no illusions regarding the challenges ahead. Arevalo’s party does not have a majority in the legislature, the party is inexperienced, and his government faces a justice system captured and controlled by the ruling elite. Luz Emilia stated, “Now we have a president who understands the peoples, and is willing to work with the peoples, but if the legislation and judicial branches don’t contribute, we’re still living in a nation of impunity.”
Abigail Monroy, Maya Kaqchikel and ancestral authority of Chuarrancho, also noted that this is only a turning point on a long road. “The Guatemalan people initiated this resistance to defend democracy in the country. But we women say we still a lot of work to do. We don’t know how this government will do, so the struggle continues… we want a free democracy for our peoples, with us-- the women who have been part of this fight for national justice, for local justice, who seek the right to the common good. The state says ‘Here come the women, they don’t know how to read or write, they don’t even know what the State is.’ Of course we know what the State is, but who chooses it, who runs it? They do.
“Now we succeeded in defending our country, but we’re going to continue to organize to show that we are capable of defending our rights,” she concluded.
The power of women working together
The delegation promised to carry the words of Guatemalan activists into international forums. The last day, Nobel Prize winner Jody Williams told a prominent group of Ambassadors and heads of multilateral organizations,
The women we talked to are extremely interested in seeing the law changed. They worry about the megaprojects. They want studies of ecological impacts and consultations. They don’t want promises without results, words without actions, they want the state to provide resources for women… and a world where women do not have to worry every time they walk out of their houses that they might be raped or killed.
Guatemalan organizations note that they played the leading role, but that the international community played a supporting role in the defense of democracy. Countries, including the United States, which has historically supported coups and upheld genocidal dictatorships in Guatemala, immediately congratulated the president-elect and denounced the pseudo-judicial moves to prevent him from taking office. The OAS and European Union called for respect for the vote and many nations issued stern declarations and imposed sanctions against Attorney General Porras and her cohorts. When it became clear that the ruling regime was isolated in both the national and international sphere, it could not block the transition of power. Civil society organizations around the world also mobilized to pressure their governments to firmly reject all efforts to undermine democracy in Guatemala, and to support the nonviolent resistance.
More than solidarity, women are building a relationship of mutual benefit in difficult times.
International vigilance and solidarity continue to play a role. “This isn’t struggle for foreigners, it´s a struggle for here—to open the doors for dignifying our lives, for the defense of human rights by our own means, but the upholding the legitimate role of the women leaders, of the social organizations, must be on everyone’s agenda,” Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu said at the delegation’s closing press conference.
More than solidarity, women are building a relationship of mutual benefit in difficult times. While Guatemalan indigenous leaders seek global alliances to face down the economic and political forces against them that are more threatening than ever, the international feminist activists know that Guatemalan women have set an example for the world that holds important lessons for confronting rising authoritarianism and patriarchal violence everywhere.
Months after the historic inauguration, the conservative forces of the Pact of the Corrupt have launched a series of actions that directly threaten the new government’s hold on power. The people continue to hold high expectations for real change, but that demands round-the-clock vigilance to hold back the offensive from the right, and to strengthen the ties and commitments forged in the 106 days of resistance.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'The Coup, For Now, Is Over': Arévalo Sworn In as Guatemala's President
"It fills me with deep honor to assume this lofty responsibility, showing that our democracy has the necessary strength to resist," Bernardo Arévalo said in his inaugural address.
Jan 15, 2024
Anti-corruption activist Bernardo Arévalo was sworn in as Guatemala's president early Monday after months of fierce opposition from the Central American nation's right-wing political establishment, obstruction that progressive campaigners and other leaders in the region decried as a coup attempt.
Arévalo's inauguration was scheduled for Sunday afternoon, but the proceedings were delayed for hours as conservative legislators stonewalled efforts to select new congressional leadership.
The delay, part of a sustained push by right-wing forces to derail the transfer of power, sparked fury in the streets, with Arévalo backers—including Indigenous groups and the country's youth—mobilizing as it appeared that the president-elect's opponents were launching a last-ditch attempt to stop him from taking office.
Leading government officials from other Latin American nations expressed alarm over the delay and said in a joint statement that "the will of the Guatemalan people must be respected."
Reuters reported that Arevalo's inauguration was "thrown into disarray after the Supreme Court allowed opposition lawmakers to maintain their leadership of Congress, and forced members of the president's Semilla party to stand as independents, further diluting its presence."
"Semilla holds only 23 of the 160 seats in Congress," the news agency noted. "Arevalo's authority, however, got a boost after prominent Semilla lawmaker, Samuel Pérez Álvarez, was unexpectedly elected as the Congress president."
Sunday's chaos capped off a drawn-out fight by Guatemala's entrenched and corrupt political establishment to prevent a reformer from taking power. Arevalo has been described as the most progressive Guatemalan president since Jacobo Árbenz, who was ousted in a U.S.-sponsored coup in 1954.
Following his landslide victory in August, Guatemala Attorney General Consuelo Porras—an ally of former President Alejandro Giammattei who was appointed to a second four-year term in 2022—launched an aggressive legal campaign to halt Arevalo's ascent to the presidency, alleging that he and his party engaged in various forms of election fraud.
Arévalo, who also faced credible death threats and assassination plots, rejected such accusations as part of a high-level coup attempt and said he would push for Porras' resignation.
"In the 20th century, coups involved tanks, bayonets, soldiers, and lasted two or three days," Arévalo said in an interview with The New York Times last month. "The coups of the 21st century are carried out with members of Congress, with lawyers, in the courts. It's more sophisticated, takes much more time, it's done with the pretense of institutional continuity."
On Monday, in his first act as Guatemala's president, Arévalo "visited the site outside the attorney general's office where Indigenous protesters have kept vigil for more than three months, demanding authorities respect the vote and that Porras step down," The Associated Press reported.
"It fills me with deep honor to assume this lofty responsibility, showing that our democracy has the necessary strength to resist and that through unity and trust we can change the political panorama in Guatemala," Arévalo said in his inaugural address. "There cannot be democracy without social justice, and social justice cannot prevail without democracy."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Great Joy' as Indigenous Q'eqchi' Win Case Against Guatemalan Nickel Mine
"This is a transcendent moment, for the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala and for a global public that is demanding an end to investments... that harm the planet and violate human rights," said one plaintiffs' attorney.
Dec 15, 2023
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled Friday that Guatemala violated Indigenous rights by allowing the construction of a massive nickel mine on land belonging to Q'eqchi' Mayans—a decision hailed as a major victory in the decadeslong fight against state repression on behalf of the multiple multinational companies that have operated the site.
The IACHR found that Guatemala's government violated the Q'eqchi's rights to property and consultation when it permitted the Canadian company Hudbay to develop the long-dormant Fenix mine, also known as El Estor, on a mountaintop in the Izabal Department of eastern Guatemala in the 2000s. The mine—now owned by the Switzerland-based firm Solway—is located near Lake Izabal, a critical source of fish and other sustenance for the Q'eqchi' and a protected habitat for species including the endangered Yucatan black howler monkey.
"We got everything we asked for."
The court ordered an immediate end to all mining activities at the site, while giving the Guatemalan government six months to start granting land title to the Q'eqchi'. No further mining will be allowed without Indigenous consent. The IACHR also ordered the government to create a development fund for the benefit of the local Indigenous population.
"We got everything we asked for," Leonardo Crippa, an attorney with the Indian Law Resource Center and a member of the plaintiffs' legal team, said in a statement. "The court has ruled for the first time that the government must make changes in the law to recognize the collective land ownership rights of Indigenous peoples and to remove all discriminatory laws from their books and to recognize these communities as distinct legal, social, and political entities."
"This will affect all of the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala," Crippa added, "granting them the right to communal land ownership, consultation before any decision is made that would affect their territories and their resources, and the authority to decide on the exploitation or not of any resources on their lands—with no outside interference."
Rodrigo Tot, a Q'eqchi' leader and 2017 winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize whose son was shot and killed by the mine's security chief , said that "we have always believed in the legal solution."
"The law takes a lot of patience and time, but we have always believed we would prevail, with God's help and with the help of our community," he added. "We are delighted the human rights court's decision will cover not only all the 16 Maya Q'eqchi' peoples affected by the mine, but all Indigenous communities of the country."
The right to mine nickel at the site was first granted by the military dictatorship that seized power in the 1954 CIA-orchestrated coup that deposed the democratically elected reformist government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz. In the 1960s, the dictatorship granted a 40-year mining concession to the Canadian company Inco, which operated an open-pit nickel mine during the Guatemalan Civil War, a period of genocidal repression of Mayan peoples.
A local subsidiary, Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN)—formerly known as EXIMBAL—was implicated in the murders of Q'eqchi' activists who opposed the mine, as well as the assassination of a Guatemalan congressman and lawyer investigating the company's activities. During the early 1980s, massacres accelerated under the rule of U.S.-backed dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who was later charged in connection with a genocide that left some 200,000 Mayans dead in the name of "fighting communism."
After two decades of development, the Fenix mine was shut down in 1981 and was dormant for three decades, during which time the Q'eqchi' resettled lands from which they'd been expelled to make way for the project. Vancouver-based Skye Resources bought the mine from Inco in 2004, and then sold the project to Hudbay in 2008. Three years later, the Russian-owned Solway Group—now based in Switzerland—acquired the project for $170 million. Mining operations resumed in 2014 amid fierce opposition from the Q'eqchi'.
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, "The leader of Solway's mining operations in Guatemala, Russian national Dmitry Kudryakov, along with Belarusian national Iryna Litviniuk, allegedly led multiple bribery schemes over several years involving politicians, judges, and government officials."
"In addition, Litviniuk conducted corrupt acts in furtherance of Russian influence-peddling schemes by unlawfully giving cash payments to public officials in exchange for support for Russian mining interests," the department—which sanctioned the pair—added.
Earlier this year, Newsweek revealed that the Biden administration was supporting a bid by Montreal-based Central America Nickel to acquire the Fenix project, which was valued at as much as $1 billion.
In 2015, the Ontario Court of Justice in Canada ordered Hudbay to disclose extensive documentation regarding alleged murder, shootings, and gang rapes perpetrated by the company's security personnel at or near the mine between 2007 and 2009. On September 27, 2009, Mynor Padilla, Hudbay's chief of security, shot and paralyzed anti-mining activist German Chub while he and other Q'eqchi' were playing soccer in the community of La Unión.
As Mongabay reported in 2015:
Chub is one of several Maya Q'eqchi' community members shot on September 27, 2009 during a crackdown on protests over threats that a group would be evicted from its ancestral lands near CGN's Fenix ferro-nickel mining project. Chub is paralyzed from the chest down as a result, and doctors determined it too risky to remove the bullet lodged near his spine. Adolfo Ich, a teacher and well-known community leader from La Unión, died after being beaten, attacked with a machete, and shot by CGN security personnel, according to witnesses. At least seven others were wounded on the same day, according to court case plaintiffs.
In 2021, Padilla pleaded guilty to killing Ich.
A 2019 multi-outlet journalistic investigation coordinated by the French outlet Forbidden Stories found that the mine may have been responsible for polluting local waters and causing crop failures, and that Solway attempted to bribe local Indigenous leaders and officials to gain support for the mining project.
Two years later, Indigenous-led protesters blockaded the mine, prompting violent state suppression.
Despite the risks to life and limb, the Q'eqchi' and their allies never stopped fighting for their rights.
"We now have a powerful new legal tool for securing Indigenous rights and for fighting the environmental damage that fuels climate change," Crippa said Friday. "We still have a lot of work to do to bring about the changes demanded by the court and to remove existing impediments to the land titling procedure that block efforts to title Indigenous lands in a prompt and effective manner."
"But this is a transcendent moment," Crippa added, "for the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala and for a global public that is demanding an end to investments—by companies, multilateral banks, governments, and other investors—that harm the planet and violate human rights."
Keep ReadingShow Less
200 Years of the Monroe Doctrine Is 200 Too Many
If the United States is serious about liberty and justice for all, respect for international law, and a rules based order that treats everyone fairly and even-handedly, it’s time to ditch the doctrine and its corollaries.
Nov 26, 2023
When those of us of a certain age were in school, we learned that the Monroe Doctrine committed the United States to protect the independence of Latin American nations, which had just freed themselves from Spanish and Portuguese rule. While it granted European nations the right to keep whatever colonies they still had in the Western Hemisphere, it declared that any attempt on Europe’s part to expand those colonies would be considered an unfriendly act against the United States. It looked like a brave and noble act, and a step forward for the U.S. on the world stage.
As the doctrine approaches its 200th anniversary December 2, we know it ain’t necessarily so.
At first, the U.S. couldn’t enforce it because its navy was too small to keep European powers out. However, the British navy was quite willing to do the job now that Latin markets were open to British trade. In that vein, British Foreign Secretary Lord George Canning suggested the U.S. and Britain issue a joint statement in defense of Latin independence. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams rejected the idea, arguing that it would make the U.S. “a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.”
Marine General Smedley Butler, who took part in several such actions, confessed that he had become a bag man for U.S. corporations, and concluded that “war is a racket.”
Instead, Adams drafted his own statement, which became the Monroe Doctrine, since president James Monroe approved the draft and could take credit for it. And so, the U.S. got the glory while the British did the work, which they were content to do for the sake of their own economic advantage.
There was more tricky business involved. The U.S. wouldn’t recognize Haitian independence from France until 1862, since Haiti rose from a brutal slave revolt. Nor did it have any quarrel with France’s demand that Haiti repay it for the loss of its slaves, an insistence which plunged Haiti deeply into debt and made it what it still is—the poorest, least stable nation in the Western Hemisphere. It was a nasty thing to do, since the Haitian revolution made the Louisiana Purchase possible.
Ever since then, there has been more and more tricky business. When Texas detached itself from Mexico in 1836, the U.S. immediately recognized it, along with its territorial claims out to the Rio Grande, which then included parts of New Mexico and Colorado. Mexico disputed those claims. Matters got worse when Texas became a U.S. state in 1845, the evident objective all along, and there was still the question of disputed territory. When President James K. Polk sent troops to Corpus Christi, which was just inside the disputed area, the Mexicans saw it as an invasion. War with Mexico followed, and in 1848, Mexico surrendered half its territory in return for a $15,000,000 payment.
During the mid-1850s, a Tennessee soldier of fortune named William Walker set off a series of coups in Central America, whereby he attempted to unite it into one slaveholding country and offer it to the U.S., either for annexation or as a client state. In 1853 and 1854, he had already tried to do something similar in northwestern Mexico. Though President Franklin Pierce recognized his short-lived regime in Nicaragua, the United States had too many problems at home to follow through with the idea. By 1860, both the offer and the daring Mr. Walker’s own life were finished.
Nonetheless, the U.S. did covet Cuba, and considered buying the island from Spain in the 1850s and 1870s. Spain wasn’t interested, but by the 1890s, the Cuban revolution was well enough along for the United States to see an opportunity and take it. When the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor, the U.S. blamed Spain and the Spanish-American War followed. And so we helped Cuba oust Spain, but with a catch. In 1902, the U.S. insisted on fastening the Platt Amendment to the Cuban constitution, which gave the U.S. the right to supervise Cuban foreign policy. In effect, the island was a U.S. protectorate until Fidel Castro took over in 1959.
Now let’s backtrack a bit. In 1895, there was a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guyana. By that point, U.S. Secretary of State Richard Olney felt confident enough to issue a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that the U.S. had the right to mediate all such disputes, which the U.S. did in this instance, without objection from either side.
In 1901, Britain and America reached a further understanding in the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. Britain recognized America’s predominance in the Western Hemisphere, while America did the same for Britain in the East. And so the English-speaking nations went halfsies on the entire planet.
By the early 1900s, the United States was getting used to rearranging Latin America to its liking. When Colombia insisted on more money from the United States than the U.S. was willing to pay to dig the Panama Canal, President Theodore Roosevelt purchased a Panamanian revolt which let him have his way. He openly boasted, “I took Panama!” He was right, since he created the country. In 1989, when Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega became inconvenient to U.S. interests there, the U.S. removed him. The operation featured the bombardment of Panama City.
In 1905, Roosevelt added a corollary of his own to the Monroe Doctrine, announcing that whenever the United States thought a Latin American nation was unable to protect foreign lives or property, or pay debts to foreign lenders, the U.S. had the right to intervene and put its affairs in order. During the first half of the 1900s, military interventions and occupations followed in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Marine General Smedley Butler, who took part in several such actions, confessed that he had become a bag man for U.S. corporations, and concluded that “war is a racket.”
The interventions continued during the Cold War. In 1954, after Guatemala’s democratically elected government nationalized United Fruit Company’s idle holdings there, intending to turn them over to small farmers, the CIA moved in and installed a dictatorship, in part because Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA boss Allen Dulles were major stockholders in United Fruit and were annoyed. Then there was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, followed by economic sanctions which continue to this day. In 1964, when the Dominican Republic’s democratically elected government decided to pursue a friendlier policy toward Cuba than the Johnson administration liked, the Marines moved in and set up a dictatorship there. The next year, the U.S. backed a military coup in Brazil.
The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s saw no essential change, with ethnic massacres, interventions, overthrows, and assassinations in Guatemala, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, and the previously mentioned one in Panama. Quite often, Latin troops and officers trained in the U.S. took part. Nor did our government bat an eye when a Salvadoran death squad murdered archbishop Oscar Romero, who had protested against what the death squads were doing across that suffering country. In 1999, as part of the U.S. drug war, President Bill Clinton initiated Plan Colombia, which included aerial bombardment in that country.
The most glaring example was against Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. By 1973, Allende had nationalized International Telephone and Telegraph’s holdings in Chile. ITT head Harold Geneen was furious about what he thought was inadequate compensation. He complained to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who had been working to destabilize the Allende government, and who were ready to arrange Allende’s overthrow and murder. A 17-year dictatorship under the more agreeable Augusto Pinochet followed, and Geneen cleaned up when he got back his business in Chile.
Economic sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela have continued in this century. And in 2009, the U.S. shrugged its shoulders when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected Zelaya government in Honduras. The unlucky President Manuel Zelaya had supported Indigenous objections to U.S. investments there that were doing environmental damage. In that same country, the fate of Berta Cáceres was worse. She had successfully blocked the building of a dam that would have flooded her Indigenous homeland and fouled its waters. Her murder in 2011 was the price she paid for that success. No condolences or protests came from our government.
Readers of this column quite likely know about all these things and more. After all, there is extensive literature and broadcast reporting on the subject. The essential point of this modest offering is a simple one. If the United States is serious about liberty and justice for all, respect for international law, and a rules based order that treats everyone fairly and even-handedly, it’s time to ditch the Monroe Doctrine and its corollaries. Adios, Olney. Adios, Roosevelt. Adios, Adams. Adios, Monroe.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy