Expert: Abuse of indigenous rights, similar in South and North America
By Talli NaumanNative Sun News Today
Health & Environment Editor
nativesunnews.today GUATEMALA CITY – Human rights abuses in Guatemala are very similar to those in the Yaqui and Lakota territories of the country’s immediate northern neighbors -- Mexico and the United States -- the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples said in an exclusive interview May 9. Special Rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz spoke to the Native Sun News Today from the capital of Guatemala, at the end of a 10-day fact-finding trip to the 65-percent indigenous country in Central America. “The commonality of what has happened among the Yaquis, Lakota, and in Guatemala, among the Maya, Garifuna and Xinca is that indigenous peoples’ rights to land, territory, and resources are very much violated,” she said in an embargoed telephone conversation the day before announcing her findings. “Increasingly, indigenous people who protest or file complaints are criminalized, detained and sent to prisons on warrants of trumped up charges,” she added.
Tauli-Corpuz is a native Kankana-ey Igorot leader from the Cordillera Region of the Philippines. Guatemalan and Mexican national officials established her mandate as U.N. rapporteur. However, she said “When you come to the country, you see a totally different thing.” She recommended the Guatemalan government “stop criminalizing indigenous people and address the fact that many of the people don’t have relocation sites.” Championing “access to justice,” she explained that Guatemalan indigenous peoples inherit a legacy of evictions due to colonization by the crown of Spain, followed by imposition of a nation state, the advent of private land tenure systems with contempt for collective holdings, then military takeover of property during the 1960-1996 war on domestic soil, and now the rise of corporate megaprojects. In the 36-year armed conflict that killed 200,000 people, some 83 percent of them Mayan, U.S.-supported state and military forces perpetrated 93 percent of human rights abuses, according to a U.N.-backed Commission for Historical Clarification report back then, peace accords directed the Guatemalan authorities to form a tribunal to investigate the violations but “there has been none,” said Tauli-Corpuz, calling for implementation to “comply with their own documents.” While the war wounds remain to be healed, foreign fortune hunters, seeking everything from minerals to water and power, have been stepping in on undefended lands and resources, she observed. Survivors of massacres of 20th Century opposition to Chixoy Dam construction remain to receive promised reparations, while new dams threaten further relocation. Megaprojects in agriculture, mining and construction, operated by foreign investors and Guatemalan elite, are displacing more native people. Among them, Canadian Tahoe Resources is facing unrest for pressuring unpopular mining by its subsidiary Minera San Rafael in Santa Rosa, one of several places Tauli-Corpuz visited in a tour that attracted an estimated 10,000 indigenous participants overall.#Guatemala debe romper ciclo de discriminación contra los #PueblosIndígenas - @UNSR_VickyTauli al final de una visita de 10 días al país: https://t.co/wnU8UpvUaN pic.twitter.com/mAplGiNo10
— UN Human Rights (@UNHumanRights) May 11, 2018
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