Fundamental inter-connectedness Local-to-national-to-global / Past-to-present
In this update, we share selected recent posts related to our work focused in Guatemala and Honduras. In all of the work and struggles we support and are involved with, we emphasize the ‘local-to-national-to-global’ inter-connectedness.
In our view, all efforts to build communities and societies, from Central America, to Palestine, the Middle East and beyond, that live in real equality and balance with all life forms and the environment, are local-to-national-to-global struggles and work at the same time.
This work and struggle play themselves out, almost always, in the context of economic and military imperialisms (colonialisms, settler colonialisms) of the past, and on-going today.
It is a very complicated, inter-connected reality.
EARTH, A PALE BLUE DOT
by Carl Sagan
Central America to Palestine
As always, Rights Action’s work continues to send grassroots funding to community groups in Guatemala and Honduras carrying out their own land-rights-environmental defense struggles, and community re-building projects.
In our education and outreach work over the past two years, we have regularly shared information documenting and denouncing the U.S., Canadian and European supported genocide and ethnic cleansing destruction of Palestine.
We do this as it is urgent in its own right to try and stop this Western-supported and legitimized abomination and madness, and to ‘connect the dots’ to the U.S.-led, Western-supported interventions, repression and genocides that devastated Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s.
Much of the work and struggles we support and are involved with over the past 30 years in Guatemala and Honduras play themselves out in the aftermath of the death and destruction of those decades.
Highlighted e-newsletters & articles
Sexual violence and rape as tools of repression
Seeking justice, 40 years later, for Maya Achi Genocide carried out by U.S. and Western-backed Guatemalan regimes, 1970s-1980s
By Grahame Russell, Rights Action, September 8, 2025
The New York Times Magazine recently published a photo-essay about the struggle for truth and justice of 36 Maya-Achi women. Together with the Asociación Bufete Jurídico Popular-ABJP (Rabinal Community Legal Clinic) – a longtime partner of Rights Action, they brought their rape and sexual violence case to Guatemalan courts and won historic convictions against the ‘material author’ perpetrators of these crimes against humanity.
U.S. and Canadian tourism investors at center of land conflicts and criminalizations of Indigenous Garifuna people in Honduras
By Karen Spring, Honduras Solidarity Network, August 26, 2025
Since 1998, Rights Action has supported and worked with OFRANEH, the lead Garifuna rights and territory defense organization along the north Caribbean coast of Honduras. With the risk of over-simplification, the greatest threat to the Garifuna people – their way of life, lands, culture, and existence - is the global tourism industry (gated communities, cruise ship industry, all-inclusive resorts, timeshare condos) trying to operate along the Caribbean coast, wresting control of Garifuna lands step by step, sketchy or outright corrupted property “sale” by “sale”.
Guatemalan commanders referred to genocide as “Palestinization” of Mayan population”
Rights Action, August 20, 2025
Chris Hedges discusses with Jennifer Harbury U.S. and Western-backed genocides in Guatemala and Palestine.
Leocadio Juracan, Indigenous land and rights defender in Guatemala, illegally jailed in military prison by corrupted Attorney General’s office, police and military
Rights Action, August 15, 2025
Leocadio is a well-known land and rights defender, and well respected member of Congress (2015-2019). Rights Action has supported the work of Leocadio and his CCDA organization, particularly in response to the death and destruction left by Hurricane Stan in 2005.
“Our Genocide”: Israeli Human Rights Groups Accuse Israel of Palestine Genocide
Rights Action, July 31, 2025
B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights (Israel) have concluded that Israel’s violence against Palestinians is a “coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.” “Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Corporate Extortionist Pressure on Honduras Causing Conditions of Forced Migrancy
Mongabay News, Rights Action, July 30, 2025
Companies and investors from the U.S., Canada and beyond are making U$20 billion in extorsionist “international arbritration” claims against Honduras. Most of these “investments” took place during the years of the U.S. and Canadian-back, “open for business” narco-dictatorship in power from 2009 to 2022.
Growing list of political prisoners in Guatemala
Rights Action, July 22, 2025
Luis Pacheco, Deputy Minister of Sustainable Development-Ministry of Mines and Energy, arrested on bogus charges, as global mining industry pushes ahead with ‘business-as-usual’
“I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”
By Omer Bartov, Israeli professor of Holocaust and Genocide studies, July 22, 2025
16 years since devastating US and Canadian-back coup in Honduras in 2009: Statement by Honduras Solidarity Network
Rights Action, June 27, 2025
Landmark Hudbay Minerals lawsuits: The “quiet period” is over
Rights Action June 2025 Newsletter
Yet another indigenous land defender killed near Fenix mine in Guatemala resisting Canadian mining
Rights Action, May 20, 2025
Xinka people say a resounding, reverberating NO to Pan American Silver mining in Guatemala
By EarthWorks and MiningWatch Canada, May 13, 2025
Hazardous machinations of Canada’s mining elite in communities across Latin America
By Jennifer Moore, April 23, 2025
200-year-old Monroe Doctrine is alive and on steroids
By John Perry and Roger Harris, April 21, 2025
North American tourism in Honduras: “A network of child sexual exploitation, human trafficking and other crimes”
Rights Action, March 27, 2025
Trumpists Agitating To Coup Honduras
By Nate Bear, March 10, 2025
Refugees and forced migrants are the harvest of our empire
Covert Action articles by James Phillips, February 12, 2025
Without the Western media, this genocide would never have been possible
Journalist Owen Jones denounces Western media for suppressing coverage of Israel's genocide of Palestinian people, January 24, 2025
Ixil Genocide Trial in Guatemala: “Clear intention to exterminate”
Rights Action, June 12, 2024
Genocide Trial in Guatemala Brings Memories of Israel’s Role in the Killings
Progressive Magazine article by Mary Jo McConahy, May 22, 2024
Bitter white-washing of U.S. role in Guatemala by author of “Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala”
By Grahame Russell, March 18, 2024