Rights Action remembers and honors Adolfo Ich Chaman, a Mayan Q’eqchi’ environmental, territorial, human rights defender, assassinated September 27, 2009, by Hudbay Mineral’s security guards

For reasons related to Covid-19, the landmark Hudbay Minerals lawsuits were suspended earlier this year.

Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2020, 10am
The lawsuits will continue, with a ‘virtual hearing’ in Toronto. (We are seeking information as to whether the public will be able to listen, ‘virtually’.)

These are tough times for many people across the planet, particularly in countries of the global south, like Guatemala and Honduras. Tough times caused by the “normal pandemics” of poverty and exploitation, racism and discriminations, violence and dispossession, corruption and impunity, and the unequal nation-state system – all now worsened by Covid19.

“What Hondurans long suspected and Americans later found out was that the president of Honduras, who has functional control of all branches of government, is also deeply implicated in drug trafficking to the United States. … Not surprisingly, a country run by organized crime became consumed by [drug trafficking] from top to bottom.”

“The United States has protected corrupt politicians, the United States has protected drug traffickers,” said Bartolo Fuentes, a one-time member of Congress and migrant-rights activist who lives in El Progreso, Honduras. “They know (President Hernandez) is a criminal, but he is servile. Whatever they ask, he does.”

Criminalization of Maria Cuc Choc, a Maya Q’eqchi’ land and Indigenous rights defender in Guatemala

Dear Sir,

Please delete this August 30 tweet:

“This [Lote Ocho] case has deep historical and structural causes. The dispossession of the lands of Mayan communities and the rape of Indigenous women sit on a continuum of violence in Guatemala’s history.”

More charges of environmental harms & human rights violations filed against company

This week we have finished compiling documents and a selection of photos related to the Chixoy Dam Reparations Campaign and are pleased to present them to you here!

From 1995 to mid-2000s, Rights Action supported this courageous effort by impoverished Mayan Achi people to tell the truth about and seek justice for massacres, killings and rapes, and illegal forced evictions suffered at the hands of the U.S.-backed regimes of generals Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt, violence that was carried out to help advance the Chixoy hydro-electric dam project of the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank.