How We Won the Landmark Hudbay Minerals Lawsuits in Canada and the Mynor Padilla Criminal Trial in Guatemala, and at What Cost!
By Grahame Russell, Rights Action

For 27 years Rights Action has run educational, fact finding and human rights delegations as part of our north-south education and activism work. Many of these previous trips had direct visits with the mining resistance, community defense struggles documented in Testimonio: Canadian Mining in the Aftermath of Genocides in Guatemala.

“Our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may
– in ways that we prefer not to imagine – be linked to their suffering.
As the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others.”
Susan Sontag

“Corporate criminality and white collar crime are so omnipresent and part of the fabric of the elite sectors of Canadian society and economy that corporate tycoons, opinion-makers and “intellectual elites” openly advocate for and defend corporate criminality, helping hide it in plain sight.”

Recently, I had a front row seat to the colliding of world visions and harsh realities in the heart and center of Canada’s financial district in downtown Toronto.  It was an intense and moving week.

“Even if 30 forensic teams worked for 30 years, that still wouldn’t be enough resources or time to exhume all the mass graves in Guatemala.” (Fernando Moscoso)

Thirty years after the exhumation process began in Guatemala, Rights Action is pleased to re-publish this report written by Grahame Russell, with Sarah Key & Ann Butwell, and published in 1996 by EPICA (Ecumenical Program on Central America & Caribbean) and CHRLA (Center for Human Rights Legal Action). Unearthing The Truth covers the first years of work of the FAFG (Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala), then called the EAFG (Forensic Anthropology Team of Guatemala) – work that is on-going today.