On this occasion, we are writing to selected contacts of PBI Guatemala Project Support Network to express our concern about a dramatic increase in SERIOUS THREATS against Guatemalan human rights defenders that we accompany. The threats are happening in the context of their work promoting economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, and the right of indigenous peoples to be informed and consulted before approval is given to large-scale development projects that affect them and their lands.

Although with different details, the threats we describe in the attached documents all relate to conflict between rural communities and state and non-state actors,1 over natural resources and land in ancestral community territories. In all the cases, economic interests are a factor on one side, and on the other side the communities’ fears for their bases of survival, and their demand that their right to prior information and consultation be respected. The context is characterised by violence and shrinking social and political spaces in which human rights defenders can carry out their work.
According to the rural communities and organisation PBI accompanies, the violence they are facing now evokes the times of armed internal conflict in Guatemala.

WE URGENTLY REQUEST the attention of the international community on the security and integrity of the members of the National Coordinator of Guatemalan Widows (CONAVIGUA), the ‘New Day’ Chortí Central Campesino Coordinator, the Comoteca Campesino Association (ACC), the Association of Indigenous Women of Santa María Xalapán (AMISMAXAJ), and the Association for the Protection of Las Granadillas Mountain (APMG). The threats against their leaders and members – which in almost all cases have included death threats – do not only constitute very grace risks to their security, their lives and their integrity, but also seriously affect their human rights work.
We also wish to alert the international community to acts of intimidation against members of the PBI Guatemala team, which took place while they carried out work of international observation during the commemoration of indigenous resistance on 12 October in Jalapa.

Download the <media 7082> Summary of case context and specific concerns</media>

Read letter<media 6999> here</media>