Guatemala: farmers shot by sugar cane multinational

Five farmers were injured as private guards of the Nicaraguan sugar cane multinational Grupo Pellas violently attempted to expand their holdings in the Central American state at the expense of small farmers.

On May 25, a hundred of mercenary personnel of the Grupo Pellas (heavily armed security guards and other workers) attacked the land of some 90 families of the Q’eqchi’ people shooting indiscriminately, injuring five, one of them severely.

The five victims of Capitalist terrorism are Arturo Chun, Santiago Ical, José Ical, Marvin Mendoza and Héctor Pop.

On February 13, the same corporation destroyed several hectares of rice, beans, squash and banana. Prior to the sale to Grupo Pellas, the former owners of the aggressive ranch Ingenio Chabil Utzaj, managed to evict some 14 Q’eqchi’ communities (more than 4000 people).

None of these terrorist actions have been persecuted by the Guatemalan authorities. 

If you want to show your discontent you can boycott any of the many business that the terrorist businessman Carlos Pellas Chamorro owns or has alliance to: Flor de Caña rum (best known produce of SER Holding, chairman), BAC Florida Bank (chairman), GBM Inc. electronic produce (chairman), IBM (associated to GBM Holding), real state by the Pellas Development Group (chairman), Toyota, Hino, Suzuki, and Yamaha (all of which are associated with this terrorist) or oranges by FRUTAN (chairman).

Guatemala: Ríos Montt sentence reversed

The Constitutional Court reversed by 2-1 votes reversing the recent veredict of guilt against genocidal dictator Ríos Montt, on the technical grounds that a claim against to two of the magistrates was disdained because it was an obvious attempt to delay the trial again, denying justice to the victims. 

This shows again that the bourgeois justice system only works in favor of the oligarchs, tyrants and other high ranking criminals, and that only popular trials are guarantee of true Justice. 

Source: LINyM[es].

Guatemala: Ríos Montt sentenced to 80 years of prison

Ríos Montt in court

The mass murderer ex-dictator has been finally officially designed as criminal against Humankind and put behind bars.

The First Tribunal A of Greatest Risk declared retired general José Efraín Ríos Montt guilty of the crime of genocide (50 years) and crimes against Humankind (30 years) for the massacres committed against the Ixil People. 

However José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, former commander of military intelligence accused of the same crimes, was acquitted, on the grounds of lacking evidence that he had any influence on the operations area.

Judge Jazmín Barrios declared:

We the judges consider that the behavior of the accused Ríos Montt fits within the crime of genocide in quality of author, therefore the corresponding penalty must apply. We the judges are completely persuaded of the intention of physical destruction of the Ixil area. 

Edgar Pérez, of Justice and Reconciliation Association (AJR), explained that:

Under the rule of Ríos Montt part of the Ixil people was displaced towards the mountains, another part was relocated under concentration camp conditions in the so-called "model villages" and a third part was massacred.

The extermination campaign killed 33.61% of the Ixil ethnicity, what demonstrates that there was clear intention of destroying this ethnic group.

After the sentence was read, Judge Barrios decreed that Ríos Montt be interned in prison with immediate effect, removing all benefits of restricted freedom that the dictator enjoyed until yesterday.

Guatemala: military attacks against the People resisting Canadian mine

The state of exception (= military rule) in four municipalities opposing the silver mining project at San Rafael district, Jalapa, Guatemala, by the Canadian corporation Tahoe Resources.

A month ago the same measure was taken against Santa Cruz Barillas, Huehuetanango, whose citizens are fighting against a hydroelectric project by Spanish multinational ENDESA.

In all cases the authorities have used the pretext of alleged criminal and narco business as excuse to declare the state of exception. Armored and assault vehicles were displayed at the towns affected, causing fear.

The government of Guatemala is in the hands of General Otto Pérez Molina, accused in the process for Crimes Against Humankind against General Efraín Ríos Montt, who led the fascist repression in the 1980s.

Source: LINyM[es].

May Day: Guatemala, Honduras

In spite of the reactionary governments of these countries, the peoples of Guatemala and Honduras brought their class cry to the streets yesterday, International Day of the Working Class.

Ciudad de Guatemala

Tegucigalpa, Honduras

In Honduras especially, there was strong condemnation of the corporate ("libertarian") intervention of the USA by means of private paramilitary forces, directly owned by the capitalists, local or foreign, inside the borders of a ghost state that almost does not exist anymore. 

Source[es]: LINYM (link 1, link 2).

Guatemala: Ríos Montt trial suspended

The trial for Crimes Against Humankind of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt has been suddenly suspended. 

On April 18th, judge Carol Patricia Flores, previously suspended in her attributions but then restored, decided unilaterally the suspension of the procedures including the contrast of witnesses, which had already seen more than one hundred testimonies. 

The trial against the fascist mass-murderer dictator has been delayed once and again by means of these kinds of legal tricks, denying the right to justice to the victims of the Guatemalan Genocide, most of them Native Americans (who make up more than 40% of the population but are systematically excluded from power in a clearly racist regime). 

Source: LINyM[es].

Guatemala: Native Americans get their crops destroyed by Nicaraguan fuel-crop multinational

On March 13th, Native American renter farmers from Polochic Valley, Verapaz, saw their crops, worked by their ancestors for many generations, destroyed by heavy machinery of the Chabil Utzaj company, owned by Nicaraguan multinational Grupo Pellas. The oppressor corporation aims to make them into fuel crop fields (sugar cane, oil palm). 

This is not the first time that this corporations attacks the People, in 2011, the same company, with support of the police, evicted 14 communities, totaling 800 families, in the same area and with the same purpose. In spite of the OAS' human rights committee (CIDH-IACHR)  mandate to Guatemala to guarantee the evicted people food and shelter, the government of this country has not done anything for them at all.

Sources[es]: LINyM, Albasud (larger report with many photos).


Update (Feb 20):

Carlos Pellas Chamorro
President of Grupo Pellas

I found (thanks to Nicaraguaymas) something more about this Nicarguan agricultural mega-corporation that has been for some years now investing, at the cost of farmers' lands and health (pesticides kill), in important projects of crops (for fuel and other industrial uses) in several countries: Nicaragua itself, Honduras (where they were backed by President Zelaya) and Guatemala. It also owns the rum company Flor de Caña, exports most of its orange juice production for Minute Maid, a company of Coca-Cola Inc. and is major shareholder of some Central-American concessions of Toyota and IBM.

Its President and strongman is Carlos Pellas Chamorro, who is the obvious main culprit here.

Source: REL-UITA[es].

Guatemala: Pentagon pretexts fight against drug traffic to send troops in

The USA at the same time promotes, manages and uses drug trafficking as pretext for military intervention. A most clear case is Colombia, the second army after Israel most subsidized by the USA (both being bully rogue states incidentally), but also in Panama, Haiti... and now Guatemala, where hundreds of US marines have been deployed with the pretext of helping against drug trafficking.

This is not, we must notice, police cooperation, as may happen in other cases and that, no matter how controversial it may be (the DEA is not above suspicion either, not at all), it is somewhat normal. This is military deployment. 

And it is a model: militarization of the "war on drugs" that has already been tried in Mexico and has been a total failure. It also suggest that the new Proconsul of nearby Mexico ("President" by means of massively rigged elections) will increase the militarization and that it is all part of a single project to consolidate the colonialist imperialist domination of the USA in Mesoamerica and parts of the Caribbean Sea. 

In the Guatemalan case, the militarization of what should be a police matter, has everybody very concerned because it was the Army the culprit of many massacres and a genocide in the civil war that shattered the country in the 20th century. It was also the USA who supported those massacres and the military dictatorship behind them.

Ref: LINYM[es].

Guatemala: government closes Peace Archive

In a clear attempt to hide the brutal democide and genocide under the military regime in the 1980s, the far-right Guatemalan government has closed the Peace Archive, which was being used to document the civil war. 

The decision was totally unexpected and was justified by the Secretary of Peace, Antonio Arenales Forno, as canceling jobs for which I find no meaning and the role of a direction for which I find no meaning.

Two million documents have already been digitalized, providing evidence for kidnappings and murder (forced disappearance) and child traffic under the dictatorship. It has provided key evidence in several high profile cases, including the trial for genocide against dictator Efraím Ríos Montt.

Both the current President, retired general Otto Pérez Molina, and his Secretary of Peace, have rejected the accusations of genocide against personalities of the dictatorship, to which they are way too close.

In the 1980s there was widespread institutional violence against communities, almost exclusively in the Maya areas of the country. Guatemala is the only state of North America that still retains a Native majority, however it has been traditionally ruled by the creole caste of Spanish culture and identity.

Source: Otra América[es].

Sea Shepherd's Watson to be extradited to Costa Rica on false charges of "murder attempt"

Capt. Paul Watson

Environmentalist hero Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was arrested in Germany by  police forces who want to defend the mafia of shark extinction. 

In the relevant incident in 2002, Captain Paul Watson ordered the Costa Rican ship Varadero to stop murdering sharks for their fins on account that the practice was illegal in Guatemalan waters, where the incident happened. However then the Guatemalan and Costa Rican authorities attempted to arrest Watson and confiscate the ship on the fabricated pretext of "murder attempt", something that the relevant videos show to be false. 

Sharks are often mutilated while still alive

The German police arrested Watson, who has Canadian passport, in Frankfurt while in transit towards France and pretend to extradite him to Costa Rica, a state that promotes the extermination of sharks for commercial purposes. 

Watson has the support of two French environmentalist notables: Daniel Cohn-Bendit (vice-president of the European Parliament) and José Bové (MEP). 

 

Don't forget to boycott every Chinese restaurant unless they sell no shark fin soup and demand the European authorities to forbid the biocidal dish within the boundaries of the European Union. Every day hundreds of sharks are tortured and murdered only for that silly soup, bringing the millenarian fish near extinction.

Sources: Sea Shepherd, The Sydney Morning Herald.

Guatemala: Army attacks Maya community: Gas Natural Fenosa, La Caixa, Repsol behind

Huehuetenango department highlighted

State of siege is a variant of the state of emergency that exists in Latin cultures and laws of military meaning: it implies the suspension of human and political rights and a totalitarian military administration (punctual localized fascism by other name).

The Guatemalan President, retired general Otto Pérez, decreed the state of siege in Santa Cruz Barillas (Huehuetenango) five days ago in support of Spanish energy multinational Unión Fenosa, owner of both the Guatemalan electricity companies, against the community opposing the construction of a reservoir.

Some 12 people have been arrested, of which two only have been named (Carmelina López Miranda, 43, and Esperanza Herrera Serrano, 74). Apparently the women were captured because the troops did not find their husbands at home in a clear violation of all human rights and common sense.

A phone call by a local resident going by the name Aurora declared: I am hidden, hungry and very worried.

The Maya communities of this area suffered massively in the civil war in the 1980s, when the military massacred the communities. Aurora recalled all that:

The military killed our parents, we are living with much sadness and terror, very specially the women with their children, please end the state of siege.

On April 13th 298 out of 305 communities confirmed their rejection to the construction. On May 2nd, Andrés Francisco Miguel, Pablo Antonio Pablo and Esteban Bernabé were ambushed by security guards of the ad hoc construction company Hidro Santa Cruz, killing the first one and injuring the others.

The murder triggered massive protests, some of which ended in destruction of property of the criminal company. This was used as pretext to impose the state of siege. 

This military intervention is similar to others executed in the recent past in various localities in support of the Spanish mafioso multinational Gas Natural Fenosa, which holds the energy monopoly in the Central American country. 

Gas Natural Fenosa is owned by La Caixa (the largest Spanish bank, partly owned by Catalan elect institutions) and Repsol (the only relevant Spanish energy corporation, still a monopoly in many sectors, even against EU directives and a major neo-colonialist enterprise in Latin America).

Source: LINyM[es].

Guatemala: genocidal general sentenced to 6060 years for 201 murders

Former Guatemalan Army General Pedro Pimentel has been sentenced to 30 years of prison for each one of the 201 people he murdered in the massacre of Dos Erres (Petén department, Maya Country). He also got other 30 years for crimes against Humankind. 

However he will only be in prison a maximum time of 50 years, as the Guatemalan Penal Code does not allow for greater effective penalties in any case.

The massacre is one of the 660 which, according to the Commission for Historical Clarification, took place in Guatemala through the armed conflict (1960-1996), which left some 250,000 casualties among dead and missing people.

Many of the massacres, mostly against Native Americans, happened in the short dictatorship of Ríos Montt (1982-83), who was also recently brought to trial.

Source: Gara[es].

Union leader murdered in Guatemala, violence against unions increasing

The LINyM[es] reports that Miguel Ángel González Ramírez, member of the Banana Workers Union of Izabal (SITRABI) was shot dead when he returned home after a football match. He is the fifth member of this union murdered in the last 10 months alone. 

He used to have police protection since his relative Marco Tullio Ramírez Portela, leader of the same union, was murdered in 2007. However the government removed his protection recently in spite of the growth in class murders.

SITRABI has repeatedly denounced the lack of protection by the Guatemalan state, a mere client of North American corporations.

Guatemala: trial against Ríos Montt for genocide begins

José Efraín Ríos Montt, general, dictator, Washington's ruthless vassal, genocidal and generally murderous criminal. 

He is now before the tribunal that will judge his crimes. The evidence is so massive that the defense chose to remain silent. 

More than 100 massacres, 1771 individual murders, 1485 underage women raped, some 30,000 citizens forcibly displaced, many of them indigenous Mayas, forced labor, forced conscription into "self-defense" militias, imprisonment of people in the "model hamlets" (concentration camps), creation of special all powerful sky-mask tribunals, which were instrumental in the execution of many people loosely accused of belonging to the resistance. 

All these are among the accusations against this fascist terrorist of the oligarchs with a presidential pretext.

The formal accusation is of crimes against Humankind, as well as the ultimate ideological, political and military responsibility for the genocide in Guatemala. 

Judge Carol Patricia Flores, after hearing the parties, ruled economic caution and home prison, opening the path for a full trial. 

For years, the former dictator remained immune as member of parliament from 1990 to 2004. He also tried to run twice for President of the Republic but was prohibited on constitutional grounds (no coupists can run). 

Source: LINyM[es].

Guatemala: another labor activist murdered

LINYM[es] informs of the murder of yet another activist of the Banana Workers Union of Izabal (SITRABI).

Idar Joel Hernández Godoy, Secretary General of SITRABI, was repeatedly shot by men on a motorcycle, being killed on the spot. In April Oscar Humberto González Vásquez, another SITRABI activist, was also murdered. In 2007, Marco Tulio Ramírez Portela, Secretary of Culture and Sports of this union, was similarly murdered by unknown sicarios.

Guatemala: 26 murdered, farms destroyed

A private security company or a death squad? A businessman or a feudal lord? Citizens or slaves?

All those questions arise and have only bad answers in the case of Guatemala, a Republic with almost 200 years of history and the one North American state with greatest apportion of Native blood and culture.

On may 13 the mercenaries of the company Chabil Utzaj, belonging to the Widmann family (of US and ultimately German orign and related by marriage to former president Óscar Berger) attacked and destroyed communal farms that the Widmann mafia claims to have purchased in 2006 (in a viced and corrupt purchase with no legal validity), and which they intend to use to plant biofuel crops.

Previously 26 peasants were found murdered in the municipality of La Libertad, Petén, Maya Country, formally Guatemala (pictured).

Sources: LINYM[es], The Agonist[en].

US 'apologizes' for experimenting with human beings in Guatemala

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a formal apology yesterday for the experiments carried in the 1940s by the US military, in which hundreds of Guatemalans were intentionally infected with sexual transmission diseases (STDs), specifically syphilis and gonorrhea in a most cruel experiment, comparable to what the infamous Dr. Mengele was doing in that same decade in Nazi-dominated Europe.

It is estimated that at least one third of the human "lab rats" were not given any treatment.

The abuse was only recently exposed by Dr. Susan Reverby. And only after media exposure, the White House considered necessary to issue the formal apology.

This is not the only such case, at least another at least equally horrific and much more long-lasting one is known to have happened in Tuskagee, Alabama, between 1932 and 1972. There, US Public Health Service recruited 399 black men, and pretended to be providing them with health care when in fact it was not. The purpose of the experiment was to observe the evolution of syphilis in vivo, not to cure it at all.

Of course these two cases are surely just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of people has deep questions about the origin of AIDS and the HIV, specially when this virus is harmless in apes and no other retrovirus is known to have ever caused a disease (they are symbiotic). Yet, suddenly, thousands and then millions of people, mostly homosexuals, drug addicts and Black people of all lifestyles, became victims of the "new plague"... and also of Big Pharma and its proposed but often useless (or maybe even more harmful) "medicines".

Whatever its origins, AIDS scored heavily in favor of the conservative/reactionary agenda, scaring people out of having sex freely like nothing before did. 

Another case that has caused much alarm recently is Morgellons disease (see: Albarelli's articles at Voltaire Net: 1, 2, 3, 4), often dismissed by physicians and authorities as mere paranoia, but that, if real, would mean experiments with artificial nano-organisms, pandemic robots rather than simply modified naturally occurring organisms.

Finally I would say that what is happening in the US Gulf Coast is also an experiment of the worst kind on people. The original motivation may not be to experiment but, given the pandemic proportions of the health problems caused by oil and specially corexit pollution all along the coast, and also the psycho-emotional disaster caused by the economic and environmental disaster at a seldom seen scale, this can also be considered a case of experimentation with human beings.

And they are not the only ones for sure. I was recalling right now the so-called colza oil health scandal in Madrid in the 1980s, which was blamed to contaminated oil but that some physicians, many of the victims and even the secret services believed that it had been originated by some mystery event at nearby US air base (now closed) at Torrejón or because of the use of some pesticides.

Evidence is hard to come but suspicions remain. And if they did that in the past, they are likely to be doing the same right now too.

See also: article at Alexander Higgins Blog and Wikipedia: MKULTRA.