Sachiyo Yasunaga's List: LC Human Rights of Youth in Guatemala

• Human Rights Defenders
   Attacks and threats against human rights defenders remain commonplace. In February 2007, for example, an employee of the Center for Legal Action in Human Rights (Centro para la Accion Legal en Derechos Humanos, CALDH) was briefly kidnapped and several other members of CALDH’s legal team received written and oral threats in connection with their work for the organization. Members of the Guatemalan Foundation for Forensic Anthropology (Fundacion de Antropologia Forense de Guatemala, FAFG) continued to receive death threats in 2007 in connection with their work exhuming bodies buried in clandestine cemeteries throughout the country.

   

  Others involved in human rights prosecutions are also routinely threatened or attacked, including justice officials, forensic experts, plaintiffs, and witnesses. Journalists, labor activists, and others who have denounced abuses by the authorities are also subject to violence and intimidation. Guatemalan human rights organizations report that 158 such acts of violence or intimidation were reported between January and August 2007.

   

  There is widespread consensus among local and international observers that the people responsible for these acts of violence and intimidation are affiliated with private, secretive, and illegally armed networks or organizations, commonly referred to in Guatemala as “clandestine groups.” These groups appear to have links to both government officials and organized crime—which give them access to considerable political and economic resources. The Guatemalan justice system, which has little ability even to contain common crime, has so far proven no match for this powerful and dangerous threat to the rule of law.

• Guatemalan indigenous rights activist and genocide survivor Jesus Tecu Osorio has been selected to receive the prestigious 2010 Roger N. Baldwin Medal of Liberty Award for international human rights defenders, Human Rights First announced today.
• Labeled as genocide by the United Nations, approximately 250,000 Guatemalan people—mainly indigenous Mayans—were massacred from 1960-1996 at the hands of state forces in perhaps the worst human rights violation of the 20th century in the Western Hemisphere.
• Tecu is now a leading human rights activist seeking justice for the genocide in Guatemala and promoting the rights of indigenous Mayans.

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• Guatemala is a country without social or economic justice, especially for the 6 million indigenous Mayan Indians who make up the majority of the population. There is a marked disparity in income distribution, and poverty is pervasive. On coffee plantations, peasants, descendants of the ancient Maya, live in concentration camp-like conditions, as de facto slaves. 40% of the indigenous people have no access to health care, and 60% have no access to safe drinking water. Education in rural areas is non-existent, with the result that 50% of the people are illiterate. Half of the country's children suffer from malnutrition. Every day in Guatemala, a country in which everything grows, people go hungry.
• The real power in Guatemala is in the hands of the Army, and that power has been used to violently control the people, resulting in the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. During more than 30 years of civil war, over 150,000 Guatemalans have been killed or disappeared, tens-of-thousands have been forced to flee to Mexico, 1 million have been displaced inside the country, and more than 440 Indian villages have been destroyed. 75,000 widows and 250,000 orphans have been produced out of the carnage. And, for more than four decades, the United States government has consistently supported the Guatemalan Army and the ruling class in their policies of repression.
• The war against Guatemalans still involves guns, bombs and human rights abuses, but the war of the 1990s is also an economic war against the poor. It is an international system of social, economic, and political control which works to separate the largest portion of the population of the world -- those who are poor, people of color, and women, especially within the developing world -- from the smallest portion of the population who are wealthy.
• Women are so desperate for jobs to feed their families that they work in the informal sector as domestic help, artisans, or farm workers. Women are often more willing to take the jobs as factory workers in the growing maquila industry (foreign-owned sweatshops).
• Public outrage over the killing of returning refugees from Mexico in 1995, and the presence of MINUGUA, resulted in a public announcement of responsibility by the President of Guatemala and the forced resignation of the Minister of Defense.
  
• international media attention has created more political space for Guatemalans to pressure their government for reopening investigations into human rights abuses in hundreds of cases that have been dismissed or ignored.
  
• After more than thirty-five years of armed conflict and staggering injustice, Guatemalans want a transformed society -- democratic leadership, rights for indigenous people and displaced communities, demilitarization, constitutional reforms, an end to impunity, a Truth Commission to examine human rights abuses, political participation, and attention to socio-economic issues such as land reform. Americans can help this process by demanding that the US government stop the death squads, support political and economic reform, and end the decades-old war against the Guatemalan people.

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• . Despite the changes brought about by the Peace Accords, serious human rights violations continue to be committed in Guatemala and, in particular, human rights defenders are assassinated, threatened or otherwise attacked. In the vast majority of such cases, effective investigations have not been carried out and the perpetrators are never brought to justice.

    

  The Human Rights Defenders Protection Unit of the National Movement for Human Rights, a Guatemalan non-governmental organization, reported almost 200 attacks against human rights defenders in 2007. Since 2000 the number of attacks against human rights defenders has increased dramatically, largely due to the failure to effectively prosecute such crimes. Defenders at particular risk are those upholding economic, social and cultural rights and those seeking accountability for past human rights crimes.

• Demobilization processes are often accompanied by sharp increases in crime. For this reason, careful attention has been paid to criminal activities of ex-combatants, both former government soldiers and ex-rebels.
• Ongoing challenges include increasing the government revenues, negotiating further assistance from international donors, upgrading both government and private financial operations, and narrowing the trade deficit.
• The distribution of income remains highly unequal, with perhaps 75% of the population below the poverty line.

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