El 23 de mayo 2022, falleció el defensor de la madre tierra y de territorio, Ramiro Choc, en El Estor, Izabal, a sus 54 años de edad.

Today, May 23, 2022, Ramiro Choc, Q'eqchi defender of indigenous rights and territory, and of mother earth, has died in El Estor, Guatemala.

“The call for a safe supply, coming from drug user activists in Canada, is a brave intervention that could have far-reaching consequences – first, in stopping deadly overdoses, but also in ending the harms of militarized prohibition in the South.” (Dawn Paley)

En 1981-1982, los regímenes genocidas guatemaltecos, respaldados por Estados Unidos, llevaron a cabo cinco masacres a gran escala contra el pueblo maya achí de la aldea de Río Negro, para dar paso a la presa hidroeléctrica de Chixoy del Banco Mundial y el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID), un proyecto de inversión en energía que fue financieramente rentable para ambos bancos de "desarrollo" y que dio lugar a una muerte masiva y a la devastación de Río Negro, y de docenas de pueblos mayas a lo largo del río Chixoy.

Five massacres were carried out by the Guatemalan regime to make way for World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank’s Chixoy hydro-electric dam project
By Grahame Russell, Rights Action

"Defending your territory is not a crime, rather it is defending the habitat of humanity"

From the date of the June 28, 2009 (US and Canadian-backed) military coup in Honduras, through to January 28, 2022, former President Juan Orlando Hernandez and the Nationalist party operated a military-backed “narco state” that maintained full military and economic with the US and Canada, that both rubber-stamped 3 sets of violent elections corrupted by drug-trafficking money (2009, 2013, 2017) and referred to President Hernandez as a “democratic ally” through to his last day in office.

“They put them on planes and tossed them into the ocean to get rid of evidence of torture,” said the judge, also describing the ripping out of fingernails and tongues, sexual assaults and electrocuting men’s genitals.

“The frenzied extraction of natural resources has created massive community displacement, dependency, poverty, and vulnerability, while encouraging corruption, violence, gang recruitment, drug trafficking, militarization of Honduran society, and systematic repression of popular protest and resistance.”