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PBI-Guatemala accompanies Human Rights Law Firm at trial of three ex-Kaibil soldiers accused in the Dos Erres massacre

By
Brent Patterson
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On April 12, PBI-Guatemala posted:

“#PBI accompanies the Human Rights Law Firm (BDH) at the beginning of the #DosErresCase debate in the High Risk Court E.

This is the fourth trial seeking justice for what happened in the Dos Erres community, La Libertad, Petén, where between 6 and 8 December 1982 a [US-trained counter-insurgency force] Kaibil commando of the Guatemalan army carried out a massacre. An estimated 200 people were killed, including men, women, old women, old men, old men and children. After several exhumations, the remains of 162 bodies were found in a well up to 12 metres deep.

In the present trial, the defendants are three ex-Kaibiles who have been identified by the Human Rights Prosecutor’s Office and charged with the crimes of murder and crimes against humanity.

The continuation of the debate will be on Thursday 20 April, where witnesses and experts will continue to be presented.”

On June 16, 2021, the Associated Press reported that Lawyers Without Borders Canada (ASFC) and the Canadian Partnership for International Justice (CPIJ) called on the Canadian government to prosecute Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes, who they believe was a senior member of the Kaibil and who they say was involved in the Dos Erres massacre.

On December 7, 2022, the two organizations called on “the Canadian government to reconsider its decision not to pursue criminal charges against Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes, who is suspected of having participated in the Las Dos Erres massacre in Guatemala 40 years ago today.”

That statement from also highlighted: “Almost the entire population was murdered. Only a handful of children survived, including Ramiro Osorio Cristales, now a Canadian citizen. LWBC, with the support of the CPIJ, is accompanying him in his quest for justice.”

PBI-Guatemala began to accompany BDH lawyer Édgar Pérez Archila in August 2010 due to several security incidents. In 2013, PBI-Guatemala extended the accompaniment to the other lawyers of the BDH who work on high-profile trials.

PBI-Colombia accompanies Justice and Peace Commission at meetings with communities in Bajo San Juan

By
Brent Patterson
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On April 11, PBI-Colombia tweeted:

“We were accompanying @Justiciaypazcol [the Inter-Church Commission on Justice and Peace] in meetings with leaders of the communities of Bajo San Juan #Buenaventura so that communities historically affected by the armed conflict can jointly build proposals for #conciliation and #peace.”

PBI-Colombia has been accompanying the Inter-Church Justice and Peace Commission since 1994.

PBI-Colombia expresses concern about explosive device placed five metres from CREDHOS office in Barrancabermeja

By
Brent Patterson
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News photo of police at scene of explosive device near CREDHOS office.

On April 10, PBI-Colombia tweeted:

“We express our great concern about the installation of an explosive device in front of the office of @Credhos_Paz [the Regional Corporation for the Defence of Human Rights] in #Barrancabermeja. Security measures are urgently needed to protect the lives of human rights defenders.”

The Canadian Embassy in Colombia also tweeted:

“We reject the threats against @Credhos_Paz, an organization that has been tirelessly fighting for peace in Magdalena Medio. The safety of human rights defenders must be guaranteed, otherwise peace will be further and further away.”

On April 11, CREDHOS also tweeted:

“#CREDHOS – PUBLICLY DENOUNCES AND CONDEMNS THE INSTALLATION OF AN EXPLOSIVE DEVICE in front of our facilities, where people, victims and vulnerable population and communities of Magdalena Medio are attended, while our team of #HumanRights defenders works.”

This statement from the CREDHOS) further explains: “On Monday 10 April 2023, at around 05:30 in the morning, an alarm was raised in the vicinity of the Camilo Torres Restrepo Park … due to the presumed installation of an explosive device just five (5) metres in front of the headquarters of the CREDHOS Corporation.”

“Subsequently, in statements given to the media, the National Police confirmed the presence of an explosive device that had an explosive device with a communiqué inside, presumably self-acknowledged by the National Liberation Army (ELN).”

“This is in response to the repeated and constant public denunciation by CREDHOS of human rights violations and breaches of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) committed by various legal and illegal armed groups in Magdalena Medio, as well as the relationship of these armed groups with economic and political sectors in the region.”

It adds: “It should be noted that the Corporation and its members have experienced systemic and repeated threats, harassment, forced displacement and assassinations of its members and workers in the last period.”

Among the demands CREDHOS raises “We demand respect for the right to defend human rights. As well as the recognition of the work of human rights defenders and respect for their life and physical and mental integrity.”

The full statement can be read at DENUNCIAMOS LA INSTALACIÓN DE ARTEFACTO EXPLOSIVO FRENTE A SEDE DE LA CORPORACIÓN CREDHOS!

PBI-Colombia has accompanied CREDHOS since 1994.

Video stills from Enlace Television.

Webinar: Stop C-IRG violence against the frontlines, this Sunday!

By
Brent Patterson
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Join us on Sunday April 16 at 4 pm ET to learn about the RCMP Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG) and the movement that is calling for the abolition of this police unit that suppresses land defence struggles in British Columbia.

Register now to hear:

Jocey Alec, Wet’suwet’en land defender

Molly Murphy, frontline activist at Fairy Creek

Louis Bockner, photographer and writer who reported on the Argenta logging blockade

Tia Dafnos, University of New Brunswick professor

To register, click here.

CBC News centers RCMP C-IRG narrative of Wet’suwet’en land struggle despite systemic investigation of unit

By
Brent Patterson
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Video: CBC reporter Rob Brown interviews C-IRG Gold Commander John Brewer.

CBC News has published:When anarchists attack. How police say a peaceful, Indigenous-led protest over a B.C. pipeline was hijacked by violent outsiders.

This article, that focuses on the destruction of Coastal GasLink equipment on Wet’suwet’en territory on February 17, 2022, highlights: “According to the Mountie in charge of the investigation, a local group of peaceful protesters with environmental and Indigenous land rights concerns was infiltrated by outsiders with a different agenda. …Brewer described the outsiders as ‘anarchists,’ a small group of people who aren’t necessarily tied to each other but subscribe to an ideology aimed at causing chaos — in Brewer’s words, ‘targeting government, government facilities, government agencies, infrastructure.’”

Brewer is the Gold Commander of the RCMP Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG) that has led militarized raids against Wet’suwet’en land defenders.

The C-IRG is now undergoing a “systemic investigation” by the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission (CRCC). That investigation seeks “to assess whether or to what extent the activities and operations of the C-IRG are carried out in accordance with legal standards, policy requirements, and leading practices.”

The CBC article briefly notes this: “The C-IRG is currently the subject of a federal probe. Brewer, who is in charge of the unit, stands by its tactics. He says police had no choice but to enforce a court order forbidding interference with the project.”

Social media responds

Some of the commentary in response to the CBC article includes:

Concerns about the C-IRG

We remain concerned that the RCMP Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG), the primary source for this CBC News narrative:

1- has failed to recognize the Supreme Court of Canada Delgamuukw decision (1997) that established that the Wet’suwet’en nation has a system of law that predates Canada’s Indian Act and that under traditional Wet’suwet’en law the hereditary chiefs are responsible for decisions regarding ancestral lands.

2- was prepared to use lethal force and “as much violence toward the gate as you want” in their January 2019 raid against unarmed land defenders on Wet’suwet’en territory. The Guardian has documented this in their article titled Exclusive: Canada police prepared to shoot Indigenous activists, documents show.

3- has been accused of “a systemic disregard for Indigenous rights and sovereignty and the [Canadian] Charter [of Rights and Freedoms] more generally” in a court application by twelve Wet’suwet’en land defenders.

4- was censured in this 2021 court ruling that found their “exclusion zones, checkpoints, searches, and restrictions on media members clearly interfere with important liberties, including freedom of movement, freedom of expression (including freedom of the press), and freedom of peaceful assembly.”

5- was criticized by numerous United Nations Special Rapporteurs, including the Special Rapporteur on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment, for allegations that it has “continued to raid Wet’suwet’en encampments, dumping drinking water and violating COVID safety measures by not wearing masks or observing safe social distancing practices.”

6- is being sued in British Columbia’s Supreme Court for wrongful arrest, wrongful detention and violation of the Charter rights of photojournalist Amber Bracken and The Narwhal.

7- has used, as confirmed by APTN News, “so-called pain compliance techniques, which included gouging a protester’s eyes with a face hold, at Fairy Creek.” Allegations also include “intimidation, torture, brutality, harassment, racism, theft, destruction of property, arbitrary detention, inhumanity, lying and deceit.”

8- physically restrained and forcibly cut a cedar bracelet and medicine bag from Wet’suwet’en land defender Sleydo’ as about ten officers watched.

9- “humiliated and degraded” Mohawk land defender Layla Staats by winking at her when she was handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser after she was arrested at a blockade on Wet’suwet’en territory.

10- refuses to respect the Gitxsan hereditary chiefs’ decision to ban this “militarized squadron” from their unceded lands.

11- will receive at least $36 million in provincial government funding despite being investigated by the federal Civilian Review and Complaints Commission to see if their actions are consistent with “the standards and expectations set by Bill C‑15, An Act respecting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the British Columbia Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) and the calls for justice from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry (MMIWG).”

12- has not withdrawn from Wet’suwet’en territory as repeatedly urged by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Webinar, Sunday April 16

Join us this Sunday April 16 at 1 pm PT / 4 pm ET to hear from those who have experienced or witnessed C-IRG violence directly. The webinar will feature Molly Murphy, author of The C-IRG: the resource extraction industry’s best ally (Briarpatch) and Louis Bockner, author of I watched my mom get arrested at a logging blockade (The Narwhal).

Register now here.

Nine environmental defenders killed/disappeared in Mexico, two in Honduras, while criminalization increases in Guatemala

By
Brent Patterson
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Otros Mundos AC: “Eustacio Alcalá Díaz, another murdered victim of the extractive mining model.”

The Guardian reports: “At least two dozen defenders have been murdered, disappeared and jailed across the region [Mexico and Central America] so far this year, according to research by the Guardian.”

In three countries where Peace Brigades International accompanies environmental defenders, the article notes:

Mexico

“On Wednesday [April 5], the Indigenous rights and anti-mining activist Eustacio Alcalá Díaz was found dead in Michoacán, Mexico, three days after he was abducted by armed men while traveling with Catholic missionaries. Díaz, who spearheaded a legal campaign to stop a transnational mining company – and won – was the ninth defender murdered or disappeared in Mexico so far this year.”

(Several media reports including by Mexico New Daily indicate the Luxembourg-based mining companies are ArcelorMittal and Ternium.)

“[Before this murder] Amuzgo Indigenous rights defender Remigio de la Cruz was shot dead at his home in Guerrero on 1 January.”

“Twelve days later, members of the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel ambushed and murdered Isaúl Nemesio Zambrano, Miguel Estrada Reyes and Rolando Magno Zambrano, community guards in Santa María Ostula, a Nahua community in Michoacán that since 2009 has tried to defend their territory against criminal gangs.”

(The Chiapas Support Committee has noted that mining companies, including Ternium, have 40,000 hectares under concession within this territory.)

“On 15 January, in the same coastal-highland region of Michoacán, lawyer Ricardo Lagunes Gasca and Indigenous leader Antonio Díaz Valencia were abducted by armed men after attending a community meeting against mining.”

(Pie de Página reports they were also opposing Ternium. The car the men were travelling in was found riddled with bullet holes.)

Honduras

“The Bajo Aguán region in northern Honduras is the region’s most deadly, where six men associated with an entrenched land struggle between African palm conglomerates and poor campesinos have been murdered since late December.”

“Two water protectors have also been killed in Bajo Aguán this year. In January, Aly Domínguez, 38, and Jairo Bonilla, 28, co-founders of the Guapinol community resistance against an iron ore mine [Inversiones Los Pinares] owned by one of the country’s most powerful couples, were shot dead in broad daylight.”

Guatemala

“In Guatemala, there has been an exponential rise in trumped-up criminal charges against community and Indigenous leaders opposing environmentally destructive projects, according to data collated by the Protection Unit for Human Rights Defenders Guatemala – known by its Spanish acronym Udefegua.”

“Jorge Santos, coordinator of Udefegua [says] ‘Today in Guatemala, the principal repressive strategy has changed from physical violence and murder to killing people civilly.’”

PBI-Guatemala accompanies criminalized environmental defender Bernardo Caal Xol.

To read the full article in The Guardian, click here.

Montreal-based Central America Nickel (CAN) reportedly plans to acquire the controversial Fenix mine in El Estor, Guatemala

By
Brent Patterson
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Photo: In November 2022, PBI-Guatemala accompanied the Human Rights Law Firm (BDH) at a hearing for Cristobal Pop (accused of the illegal detention of people for a protest held by the Artisanal Fishermen’s Union to denounce the pollution of Lake Izabal by the Fenix mine) and Q’eqchi’ journalist Carlos Ernesto Choc (accused of “instigation to commit a crime” after he reported on an October 2021 protest against the Fenix mine).

In January, Diálogo Américas reported: “The U.S. Treasury Department imposed economic sanctions on Russian citizen Dmitry Kudryakov and Belarusian citizen Iryna Litviniuk, who financed and directed three mining companies in Guatemala.”

That article specified: “The mining companies owned or controlled by Kudryakov are: Compañía Guatemalteca de Níquel (CGN), Compañía Procesadora de Níquel (ProNiCo), and Mayaníquel, subsidiaries of Solway Investment, a mining group based in Switzerland and fueled by Russian capital, the Treasury Department indicated.”

Now, Newsweek Diplomatic Correspondent David Brennan reports: “A memo obtained by Newsweek indicates that, with the support of the U.S. government, the Guatemalan assets of the Switzerland-based Solway Investment Group—which were put under U.S. sanctions amid allegations of Russian influence peddling and ecological devastation—are in line for acquisition by a Canadian company for a ‘substantial discount’.”

The article adds:

“The Montreal-headquartered Central America Nickel (CAN) corporation reportedly plans to acquire the Fenix Nickel Project, a vast complex located close to the eastern Guatemalan town of El Estor that is valued at up to $1 billion and has been in operation since 1960 despite fierce resistance from local indigenous communities.

A legal representative for CAN … acknowledged in a statement to Newsweek that the firm has applied for Treasury consent to acquire the sanctioned assets, via an “exemption request in the month of January 2023 for the Solway-owned assets and permits in Guatemala, through its duly incorporated American subsidiary.”

The memo says that CAN is working closely with a U.S. diplomat at the American Embassy in Guatemala, who has been speaking with the Department of Defense on the company’s behalf, and who has connected the company with the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to seek additional funding.

According to the memo, the DFC has already agreed to provide political risk insurance for a nickel project in Guatemala, plus $300 million in financing for additional processing facilities. The nickel sulphate produced there is intended for sale “to American battery and [electric vehicles] manufacturers such as General Motors.” Contacted by Newsweek via email, the DFC declined to comment.

The diplomat, the memo says, recently confirmed they “will be supporting the company in its efforts to acquire the Solway nickel assets in Guatemala, following the recent sanctions imposed on the Russian company.”

The plan, as outlined in the memo, is to transfer CAN’s nickel assets in Guatemala to a U.S.-incorporated firm called America Rare Earth Sources Inc. (ARES), which will be wholly owned by CAN. CAN will acquire 100 percent of ARES, which will in turn acquire 100 percent of two Guatemala companies, Rio Nickel Inc. and Nichromet Guatemala Inc.”

The furor around Solway may have opened a door for the U.S. to wrest a strategic asset away from Russian—and by extension Chinese—influence.

A former U.S. diplomat with knowledge of the situation—who also requested anonymity to discuss the issue candidly—said the reported acquisition plan fits with Washington’s new focus on strategic materials

The U.S. Geological Survey added nickel to its list of critical minerals in 2022. Nickel is used in the production of key products including stainless steel, superalloys, and rechargeable batteries. The growth of the electric vehicle industry—projected to be worth some $858 billion worldwide by 2027—has been a particular driver of growing focus around nickel.”

Timeline of the Fenix mine

In 1960, Toronto-based INCO Ltd. began negotiations with the military dictatorship of Guatemala to establish the Fenix mine. By 1965, EXMIBAL, a joint venture between INCO and the Guatemalan state, was granted a 40-year mining licence.

Professor Shin Imai has written: “Colonel Carolos Arana Osorio was responsible for clearing the Indigenous people out of the INCO region in Zacapa-Lake Izabal. He launched what has been referred to as a ‘reign of terror’ in the region, in which the number of people killed is estimated to be between three and six thousand. Major construction began on the El Estor mine in 1974 aided by a $20 million loan from the Canadian Export Development Corporation.”

By 1982, INCO shut down the mine because the market value of nickel had declined and the cost of oil was rising.

Then in 2004, Vancouver-based Skye Resources bought the Fenix mine from INCO. (INCO was bought by the Brazilian mining company Vale in 2006). The Canadian Embassy in Guatemala helped Skye Resources acquire a 3-year exploration license for a 259 square kilometre area that encompassed at least 19 Maya Q’eqchi’ settlements, including Lote Ocho. Skye renamed EXMIBAL to the Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN).

Then in April 2006, Guatemala granted Skye Resources and CGN a license that allowed them to start mining. By September 2006, 300 Maya Q’eqchi’ families moved onto company-claimed land stating that it had been stolen from them 40 years prior.

In 2008, Skye Resources merged with Toronto-based Hudbay.

Between 2007 and 2009, personnel from the mine along with the police and military violently expelled members of the community of Lote Ocho from their homes. During an expulsion in 2007, eleven Mayan Q’eqchi’ women were gang-raped.

In 2009, community leader Adolfo Ich was killed, while another community member, German Chub, was shot and paralyzed.

Then in September 2011, the mine was purchased by the Switzerland-based Russian company Solway Investment Group (and its subsidiaries CGN and PRONICO).

In January 2021, Mynor Padilla, a former army lieutenant colonel and security chief for the Fenix mine, was found guilty of homicide in the death of Adolfo Ich.

The full article by Newsweek can be read at Exclusive: U.S. Role in Notorious Nickel Mine Deal Revealed (April 6, 2023).

Canadian mining company displaces Maya Chorti cemetery in Azacualpa, Honduras, now threatens drinking water of nearby communities

By
Brent Patterson
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Photo: “We are not asking for money, we are defending our rights. No to the exploitation of the cemetery hill.” Photo by Rights Action.

Last April, the Peace Brigades International-Honduras Project posted:

“After seven years, despite ratification in an Open Council and an injunction in their favour, the struggle of the Azacualpa community continues.

The exploitation of the hill has not stopped, and with it the dispossession of the land, the displacement of its inhabitants, exhumations and environmental contamination.

We at PBI express our concern for the complex situation experienced by the Maya-Chortí people, who in exercising their right to defend their ancestral lands suffer constant threats. We are also concerned about the intimidation and threats against Bufete Estudios para la Dignidad, who have been closely following the case.”

Now, Elena Novak reminds us in her Waging Nonviolence article that:

“For 200 years, the cemetery in Azacualpa, Honduras was the resting site of generations of Chorti people, descendants of the Indigenous Mayans.

But in January 2022, in the middle of the night, the Canadian-based mining company Aura Minerals destroyed the sacred burial site to get at the gold beneath it. In the morning, the people woke up to find the bodies of their loved ones gone — to where, they still have no idea.

Photo: Rights Action.

In 2014, the community blockaded the entrance of the mine after learning of the company’s plans to expand into the cemetery… A few weeks later, military and police retaliated with beatings, tear gas and arrests. In 2015, the community tried again, prompting more arrests.

The community of Azacualpa is unified under the Committee for People Affected by MINOSA, the subsidiary of Aura Minerals that has operated the San Andrés mine in Azacualpa since 2009 and sold extracted gold abroad to companies that include Asahi Refining and Auramet International, both of which have refineries in the United States.

The committee, along with Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective and the human rights law firm Bufete Estudios para la Dignidad, sent a joint letter at the end of January to [Utah-based] Asahi and [New Jersey-based] Auramet to express concerns over their continued business with the mining company and urging them to immediately cut ties.”

That letter further cautions:

“We also note with great concern that the impunity evidently enjoyed by the company threatens with much more than the exploitation of the cemetery. Requested documents indicate that the mine’s expansion plan implies the forced displacement of the community of Azacualpa as well as the destruction of a water source that supplies the community of La Ceibita and other nearby communities. Local leaders report that the company has begun exploring near the water reservoir despite opposition from the affected community.”

We continue to follow this situation with concern.

SOS. From @Cehprodechn they warn that if “mining concessions lead to territorial conflicts like @guapinolre or #Azacualpa, Honduras would be completely ungovernable”

 

Note: A Canadian company

The “Legal” page on the Aura Minerals website says: “Aura Minerals Inc. (“Aura Minerals” or “Company”) is a Canadian company and reporting company in the Provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia, Canada.”

SEDAR, “the electronic system for the official filing of documents by public companies and investment funds across Canada”, reveals that the mailing address for Aura Minerals Inc. is Coral Gables, Florida, and that its head office address is Road Town, Tortola (British Virgin Islands), while its “Principal Regulator” is the Canadian province/jurisdiction of Ontario and that its stock exchange is the TSX (Toronto Stock Exchange).

In May 2018, The Guardian reported: “A transnational mining company, Aura Minerals, has been digging up graves in the 200-year-old cemetery near the community of Azacualpa, La Union, to clear the way to dig for gold. Some residents fear the graveyard is the last line of defence before the Canadian-listed company will eye the community as its next extraction site.”

PBI-Colombia accompanies the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó on Stations of the Cross walk on Good Friday

By
Brent Patterson
-

On April 7, PBI-Colombia tweeted:

“We accompany @cdpsanjose [Peace Community of San José de Apartadó] in #ViaCrucis [Stations of the Cross], making #memory members of the community and peasants killed during the years in #territory. Remembering episodes of suffering but also reinforcing the convictions of peaceful resistance and defense of life.”

About 1,350 farmers came together on March 23, 1997, to establish a peace community declaring themselves neutral in the war, a community bound by non-violence and solidarity, and prohibiting any armed actor on their territory. More than 200 members of the community, many of them leaders, have been killed by armed actors – mainly by right-wing paramilitary death squads and the national armed forces.

The Peace Brigades International-Colombia Project has accompanied the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó since 1999.

“Rather than die of thirst, it is better to fight standing up” – Guapinol River defender Reynaldo Domínguez

By
Brent Patterson
-

Photo: Reynaldo Domínguez. Photo by Roberto Palomo.

The Madrid-based newspaper El Diario reports on Honduran environmental defender Reynaldo Dominguez in an article titled Living under death threat for defending his community’s river: “I am more afraid that we will all die of thirst”.

We highlight that the article notes: “Last January, weeks after his return from a European tour organized by Peace Brigades International in which he denounced the threat to land defenders in Latin America, his brother Ely Domínguez and another member of the Guapinol River resistance, Jairo Bonito, were murdered. Both were among the activists imprisoned after the eviction of the camp.”

Photo: PBI accompanied defenders Reynaldo Dominguez (Honduras), Andrea Torres (Colombia), Marcelina Barranco (Mexico) and Carlos Ernesto Choc (Guatemala) on advocacy tour in Europe in November 2022.

Key excerpts from the article also include:

““Rather than die of thirst, it is better to fight standing up,” Reynaldo Domínguez repeats to himself to remind himself why he defends rivers despite the risk involved in speaking out for the environment in his country, Honduras.

Since 2018, when an extractivist project changed everything in his community, the 58-year-old activist has dedicated his life to protecting the water of the rivers of the Aguán Valley, in the Honduran municipality of Tocoa, without giving in to constant threats.

Reynaldo was born in Guapinol, a small community of 2,800 inhabitants where he grows corn, bananas, cassava, cocoa and has some cattle.

Iron oxide mining is contaminating the rivers and ecosystems from which his community draws its water supply. On one occasion, the Comité Municipal de Defensa de los Bienes Comunes de Tocoa, to which he belongs, managed to paralyze the mining activity for a time. His action has cost him prison, threats and the murder of a family member, but he does not give up, he says, because “capital is savagely cruel to the communities”.

Life changed in Guapinol in 2018 when the mining company Inversiones Los Pinares began extracting Iron Oxide from a protected area of the Montaña Botaderos Carlos Escaleras National Park, affecting the Guapinol and San Pedro rivers.

The process of sedimentation in the extraction of iron oxide has been contaminating the water of the Guapinol and San Pedro rivers. “The fish have already begun to disappear,” says Reynaldo. The fish that survive, he adds, “get sick” making them unfit for human consumption. Cases are being documented of people with skin irritations after using the water. As Reynaldo explains, “people who can’t afford to buy bottled water consume water directly from these rivers.

Fearing the loss of what is most sacred to them, 450 residents, including Reynaldo, set up a peaceful encampment they called Campamento por el Agua y la Vida (Camp for Water and Life). The protest succeeded in paralyzing extractivist activity for 88 days until they were violently evicted by the military police and the army.

“We didn’t understand that the authorities were clotted with this mining project,” Reynaldo recalls resignedly. In order to undermine the peaceful resistance of the residents of Guapinol, some of the camp participants were arrested and charged. “The company, together with prosecutors from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, fabricated false crimes, such as, for example, that of illicit association, which leads directly to prison,” Reynaldo explains as the reason for his time in prison.

The environmentalists were locked up in high-security prisons alongside drug traffickers and hired killers while facing charges such as usurpation, damage, unjust deprivation of liberty, robbery, aggravated arson against the company and illicit association.

Reynaldo and eleven other comrades were released after 15 days of confinement. However, eight of the detainees remained in prison for 914 days. More than ten months after their release, they complain that they have still not received their final letters of release from the judicial authorities.

[Reynaldo has also] reported receiving death threat messages. He is living in fear, he admits. Like other comrades in the struggle, he has stopped sleeping in his own home and lives in fear that someone might harm his children or family members again.

Reynaldo believes that his brother’s crime is aimed directly at him. But fear for his safety does not outweigh his fear of the effects of the extractivist project on the river that feeds his community. “I’m more afraid that we will all die of thirst, because it’s no longer about eliminating one person, but the whole community. That is why, he says, he continues to fight for his dream: “To leave the communities free of extractivist projects”.”

The full article can be read in Spanish at Vivir bajo amenaza de muerte por defender el río de su comunidad: “Me da más miedo que todos muramos de sed”.

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