After killing of Misael Mata Acensio, resistance grows against Montreal-based Central America Nickel in Guatemala
“The historical alliance between Canadian mining corporations and the Guatemalan government has allowed for systematic killing with impunity, promoting a culture of silence and community fracturing in El Estor. Mata Asencio is the first to be killed for resisting mining in neighbouring Livingston. “
Water defense motivates pushback against mining in Guatemala
By Romi Fischer-Schmidt, June 5, 2025 • Leer en castellano
https://www.ojala.mx/en/ojala-en/water-defense-motivates-pushback-against-mining-in-guatemala
On May 14, land defender and grandfather Misael Mata Asencio was found dead with multiple bullet wounds. He was killed at the offices of an industrial equipment supplier, where he worked as a security guard.
Mata Asencio lived in the coastal municipality of Livingston in eastern Guatemala, where the Caribbean Sea meets the Sierra Santa Cruz mountains. His home village of Las Flores lies on a verdant mountainside above Guatemala’s largest lake. It also sits atop valuable deposits of nickel laterite, prized by international investors.
As details continue to emerge, it is clear that any police or otherwise state-led investigation into the killing will be hard-fought. Mata Asencio opposed a powerful and moneyed player in Livingston: the Rio Nickel Company, a Canadian-owned nickel mining venture transitioning from exploration to exploitation phase. The Central America Nickel (CAN) company, which owns Rio Nickel, has plans to dig a new open pit mine atop the Sierra Santa Cruz, just three kilometers from Las Flores.
In response to Mata Asencio’s assassination, the National Leadership of Indigenous Ancestral Authorities (ENAIAI) published a notice calling on the Guatemalan state to protect land defenders, and respect national laws regarding free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous communities. In their communiqué, the ENAIAI seek the suspension of mining activity in Livingston, and request support from the international community.
On May 8, just days before he was killed, Mata Asencio took community members by foot on mountainside search missions, identifying deep bore holes left behind by mining exploration to raise awareness about the Rio Nickel project. He was a member of the 54 Communities, an alliance of villages opposed to mining that are impacted by Rio Nickel’s mining exploration, and planned open pit mine.
“We won’t allow it. If we don’t [resist], they’ll kill us for our water. The 54 Communities live from the mountain. We say: we don’t want the mine here,” said Enrique Che in an interview at his community’s water source, where PVC tubing collects water from a stream coming off the Sierra Santa Cruz. Che, a friend of Mata Asencio’s, is a spokesperson for the 54 Communities and a leader from the village of Río Pita, whose communal water source is a mere four kilometers from the proposed mine site. “Asencio was part of our resistance in the search of exploration bore holes all over the mountain. He even came here, to my community.”
Most of the 54 Communities are Indigenous Maya Q'eqchi'. They say there has been no consultation about expanding mining activities. News of the eleven exploration permits issued to CAN-owned subsidiaries between 2007 and 2021 was only revealed to community members in January as a result of community pressure.
“Everyone, from Sejá to Saila, this side of the mountain, is in agreement: we don’t want Rio Nickel to enter here. All the streams fed by this mountain provide water to their communities,” said Che, who is a Maya Q’eqchi’ ancestral authority. When I spoke to Che over the phone in May, he told me Mata Asencio isn’t the only opponent to Rio Nickel to have received death threats.
Tension has been building as the Rio Nickel project expands. Community members have reported increased vehicle traffic, tree cutting, and exploration hole boring, without transparency or adequate government answers.
“Asencio was here with us when we blockaded the highway in resistance, because if we hadn’t done it, the Minister of Environment or the Minister of Energy and Mines wouldn’t have answered us,” said Che. He was referring to a five-day blockade erected the highway connecting Guatemala City to the northern department of Petén in April.
Government officials—including two national congressmen, the mayor of Livingston and the governor of Izabal—visited the blockade. The mayor and governor reaffirmed their commitment to their constituents, and their rejection of the Rio Nickel project.
Blockaders demanded the cancellation of all mining-related licenses in the area. They also secured a commitment from Environment Minister Patricia Orantes, Departmental Governor Carlos Tenas, and the Vice-Minister of Energy and Mines Carlos Avalos Ortíz to meet with the 54 Communities. Their first meeting took place at the Guatemalan congress on April 24.
A second meeting took place near the proposed mine, in the town of Rio Dulce on Friday, May 23, nine days after Asencio Mata’s killing.
Before the meeting, leaders from the 54 Communities shared a general call-out convening a peaceful show of resistance to the mining project. Thousands of residents converged on Rio Dulce, where leaders addressed the government representatives. Local shops and supermarkets closed for the afternoon in a broad show of support for the rally. Officials present promised to provide more information to community members at a subsequent meeting, to be held June 16.
Though information about mining licensing is often opaque in Guatemala, the Extractives Industry Observatory (OIE) published an analysis of CAN's current license applications, filed by its two Guatemalan subsidiaries, Rio Nickel and Nicromchet. Of eleven exploration licences before the Ministry of Energy and Mines, seven are located in the 54 Communities, in Livingston. Three more are located in the neighbouring municipality of El Estor, where local leaders have formed their own alliance of 12 Communities.
Eight environmental permits have been filed relating to CAN's licence applications, including three for mineral exploitation, allowing the digging of an open-pit mine. Though the exploitation licenses continue to be under review, those three environmental permits were approved in an irregular process in late 2023 and early 2024, during the last three months of the previous president Alejandro Giamattei, according to the OIE. These permits lack environmental impact assessments, something that wasn’t disclosed until January of this year.
Canadian mining companies in high places
Central America Nickel is a Canadian mining and technology company focussed on the processing and purification of energy and so-called ‘critical minerals’ including nickel. It is privately owned, which means it is not listed on any stock exchange, and the company’s financial information—including the identity of investors—is not publicly available.
CAN was founded by Pierre Gauthier, its website lists 10 employees and board members, and boasts mining investments in Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Few avenues exist to hold Canadian companies accountable for their investments and the actions of their subsidiaries, leading activists and advocacy groups to take direct action at company AGMs, or at the world’s largest mining conference, PDAC, held annually in Toronto.
In both Canada and Guatemala, a lack of transparency in licensing and corporate identity makes details hard to confirm. This is further complicated by diverse international entities and a rotation of corporate actors.
Nicromchet’s first licenses in Livingston date back to 2007, and has since been granted over 20 further licenses in Guatemala. Nicromchet’s primary funding partner is Seed Capital Inc., also founded by Gauthier of CAN. In 2015, CAN purchased all of Nicromchet’s shares—and thus gained control of its licenses—the same year Gauthier assumed CAN’s presidency.
The accumulation of mining licenses by Nicromchet was facilitated by the company’s legal representative Alfredo Salvador Galvez Sinibaldi, who had been Guatemala’s director general of mining from 2005 to 2008. Galvez Sinibaldi was made Nicromchet’s general manager in 2009, while working under the Minister of Energy and Mines during Álvaro Colom’s presidency, from 2008 to 2012, and becoming Vice-Minister of Energy and Mines during the Otto Perez Molina presidency, from 2012 to 2015.
Intergenerational Indigenous resistance
Open pit mining is new to Livingston, but neighboring El Estor experienced 65 years of nickel mining in its mountains via the infamous Fenix mine, which has largely been under Canadian ownership. The Fenix mine has a devastating intergenerational impact on the cultural and ecological fabric of the region.
Some Q’eqchi’ families straddle both municipalities, and activists in El Estor are eager to share warnings and stories of resistance with their cousins in Livingston. Angelica Choc is one such activist. Her husband Adolfo Ich Chaman was assassinated by mining security in El Estor in 2009. She was involved in a 14 year struggle in Canadian courts, which finally came to a close after Toronto-based nickel company Hudbay Minerals signed a reparations agreement in September of last year.
Choc’s family fled indentured labour at a coffee plantation within the Fenix mine's exploration area in 1978, the year it officially opened. Choc’s mother moved to the town of El Estor, but many of her aunts fled and established a new community in a remote, island-strewn section of the Pita River near Livingston. Today, her cousins find themselves organizing against a Canadian mining company.
“We are stones in the path of the mining companies, but not the kind they are looking for,” said Choc in a phone interview in May. “We prevent them from causing harm to our mountains. We know as Indigenous peoples that we have the right to defend what is ours: Q’eqchi’ territory.”
The brash assassination of Misael Mata Asencio sends a chilling message to anyone in Central America Nickel’s path. The Fenix mine in El Estor has left a long trail of murdered, threatened and criminalized community organizers and human rights workers.
The killings range from targeted assassinations ordered by military General Carlos Arana Osorio during the exploration phase in the 1960s, to the 1978 massacre at Panzós, for which the official death count is 53, and to the much more recent killing of Choc’s husband Adolfo Ich Chaman in 2009, and that of fisherman and organizer Carlos Maaz, who was killed in 2017.
The historical alliance between Canadian mining corporations and the Guatemalan government has allowed for systematic killing with impunity, promoting a culture of silence and community fracturing in El Estor. Mata Asencio is the first to be killed for resisting mining in neighbouring Livingston.
Despite increasing pressure from CAN, the 54 Communities remain united and resolute in their message: No to Central America Nickel’s Rio Nickel project.
(Romi (they/elle) is a non-binary settler from Canada, working as an organizer, educator and artist across borders. They focus their solidarity work on abuses by mining industries, particularly those coordinated in Toronto, Romi's birthplace.)
60-year Nightmare of Fenix Mine in Q’eqchi’ territories
1964-2004: INCO (Canadian owner) and EXMIBAL (subsidiary in Guatemala)
2004-2008: Skye Resources (Canadian, incorporated by former INCO directors) and CGN (new name of EXMIBAL)
2008-2011: Hudbay Minerals (Canadian), bought Fenix mine and CGN mine from Skye
2011-Present: Solway Investment Group (Swiss) and CGN/ PRONICO (a second subsidiary company)
2024-Present: Fenix Nickel Company (USA), a new subsidiary of Solway Investment Group
2024-Present: Central America Nickel (Canada) and Rio Niquel (Guatemala subsidiary)
Occurring in waves over this entire time, mining in the Q’eqchi’ territories of eastern Guatemala has been characterized by corruption, forced evictions and land theft, human rights violations including killings, rapes, lawfare (criminalizing community defenders), environmental and health harms and, for the most part, complete impunity in Guatemala and in the home countries of the companies (mainly Canada, also Switzerland and most recently the U.S.).
The recent settlements of landmark Hudbay Minerals lawsuits (May 21, 2025 communique: https://rightsaction.org) are a hugely important exception to this almost iron clad norm of impunity.
Corrupt, repressive government of President Giammattei
Rio Dulce community members find it incredible that yet another mining company arrives in the Q’eqchi region – this time, Central America Nickel, claiming to have mining licenses, when they knew nothing about this. They are aware that CAN/Rio Nickel’s alleged licenses were granted during the government of president Alejandro Giammattei who is directly implicated in corruption schemes with mining companies in this region and allegedly received financial benefits from drug traffickers.
Cynical hypocrisy in the U.S. and Canada
Giammattei is now barred from entering the U.S. and Canada due to this alleged corruption, yet the U.S. and Canada imposed sanctions on Giammattei only after he left office in January 2024. During his entire time in office, the U.S. and Canada referred to the Guatemalan government as a “democratic ally”, maintaining and pushing for expanded North American investments and business interests in the country. (More information: Rights Action, April 10, 2025)
Call by Q’eqchi’ people
Rights Action supports this call of the Q’eqchi’ people for:
Suspension: Immediate suspension of all mining operations in Q'eqchi' region of El Estor, Panzos, Livingston.
Investigatory commission: Formation of a commission to investigate violences and harms of mining against Q’eqchi’ people and the environment between 2004-2024.
Reparations: Preparation of a compensation plan for people and communities that suffered the violences and harms.
Consultation process: Then, implementation of a consultation process, based on prior and complete information in the Q'eqchi' language to decide if mining operations might continue in the future.
Rights Action calls on organizations and people - particularly in Canada, Switzerland and the U.S., home to the mining companies – to initiate, or continue with your education and activism work to pressure our governments, and our mining companies to stop all mining, and to comply with these fair and balanced demands of the Q’eqchi’ people.