17th Anniversary: Targeted killing of Adolfo Ich by Hudbay Minerals’ head of security
Rights Action remembers Adolfo Ich, victim of a targeted killing on September 27, 2009 by Mynor Padilla, head of security for Hudbay Minerals at the notorious Fenix mine in Maya Q’eqchi’ territories of El Estor, Guatemala.
Photo: James Rodriguez
We give thanks for the courage and resolve of his wife, Angelica Choc, who filed the first lawsuit against Hudbay, in her case for the killing of her husband.
Soon after, two other lawsuits were filed: German Chub, shot and left paralyzed by Mynor Padilla the same day Adolfo was singled out and killed; and, 11 women who were gang-raped by roving bands of company security guards, Guatemalan soldiers and police, during the January 2007 illegal forced eviction of their village on behalf of the company.
13 BRAVE GIANTS tells the story, with numerous photos, of “how we won the landmark Hudbay Minerals lawsuits in Canada and the Mynor Padilla criminal trial in Guatemala, and at what cost!”
The precedent-setting 15-year civil law trial in Canadian courts, overlapping and intersecting with the corrupt, violent criminal trial in Guatemala against Mynor Padilla.
The historic backstory to Hudbay’s ownership (2004-2011) of the notorious Fenix mine, beginning with the U.S.-backed military coup in 1954 that led to, soon after, the arrival of the Canadian mining giant INCO that easily acquired from the military regime in power vast tracts of Q’eqchi’ lands, and established the Fenix mine operation.
The very pro-mining political context in Guatemala and Canada that made seeking even a measure of justice that much harder.
The strength and dignity of the 13 plaintiffs and their families who stayed the course through endemic conditions of poverty, numerous very questionable delays by Hudbay’s lawyers in both legal proceedings, a series of threats and attacks including the brutal killing of a family member of one of the plaintiffs, all aimed at intimidating the 13 plaintiffs for their courage to tell the truth and seek a measure of justice.
The final chapter, when Hudbay finally chose to throw in the towel and sign an out of court settlement with the plaintiffs and their lawyers in October 2024.
Unresolved Issues
13 BRAVE GIANTS was follow-up by an article setting out What the Hudbay Minerals lawsuits & Mynor Padilla criminal trial exposed & left unresolved, by Grahame Russell, April 27, 2026.
Mining in the Aftermath of Genocides in Guatemala
Looking at four specific mining resistance struggles across Guatemala (including that of the Q’eqchi’ people against the harms, corruption and violence linked to Hudbay), TESTIMONIO remains a go to book to understand the depth of complicity of the Canadian government (and others) in systematic mining-linked corruption, repression and environmental harm across the country. It was just after the worst years of U.S. and Western-back State repression, including genocide committed in four specific Mayan regions in the 1980s, that Canada began to push hard to “bring development to Guatemala”, and opened up this most recent-and-ongoing wave of global (Canadian-led) extractivism.
Between The Lines publisher
What is land? A resource to be exploited? A commodity to be traded? A home to cherish? In Guatemala, a country still reeling from thirty-six years of US-backed state repression and genocides, dominant Canadian mining interests cash in on the transformation of land into “property,” while those responsible act with near-total impunity.
“TESTIMONIO is a stirring and unique piece of work. On the one hand, it brings together a wealth of knowledge and analysis from people who have truly invested the time and energy into getting it right. But what really brings this book home are the powerful first-hand accounts of Canadian mining operations and the apparatus around them. To read this book is to bear witness to a massive, collective crime being committed by the rich and powerful in Canada against the people of Guatemala. It should be a call to action for people in this country to take responsibility for what is being done in our name.”
– Tyler Shipley, author: Canada In The World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination