mining
Day 4 in Guatemala - communities on the front line
After meeting the community in Peronia, we received a message that there were some people in the village of San Rafael who had been receiving threats because they were challenging the policy of a mining company who they felt were trampling over their rights. We arrived to a small village in a very beautiful area with lots of trees and green fields, surrounded by mountains... the kind of place that should be a haven of tranquility.
We went to the house of Oscar, who has been the target for a series of threats and he explained to us what had been happening.
He started by setting out how we, as humans, resist or challlenge something that is unknown to us or that has not been explained properly. It is our nature, he explained.
Recently a mining company has been given a licence to mine for gold, lead, silver and zinc in the area, and already the company has started the preliminary work.
Guatemala - "To fight money is a very difficult thing to do"
On Sunday we went to a very poor area called Peronia where the conditions are dreadful - tiny one room dwellings, intermittent electricity, often scarcity of water and poor sewerage. Yet amid this desolation, human rights defenders had successfully closed down a sand mine which had been operating there.
The mine had covered the whole area in a fine dust, children were getting sick, clothes could not be washed, the loud noise from the machines was there day and night, the food had to be always wrapped. The sand polluted the river and thus the town water supply.
They decided to fight "but to fight money is a very difficult thing to do". The threats started and tear gas was used but the thinking was...
... "we might run out of water; we might run out of forest; we might run out of life".
It was the women who were more active in the beginning - Christi de Rivera described how she took her children aged 4 and 6 and sat down with a few others on the road, blocking the trucks, despite the fact that she was afraid that something might happen to her and her children.
Day 3 in Guatemala - the shanty town Vs. the sand quarry
Yesterday we went to Peronia, one of the new shanty towns that have sprung up around Guatemala City to accomodate the more than 1 million people who travel into the city everyday to work. Slums where a family can pay 30 Euro for one room with limited water and sanitation. The community here in Peronia have been badly affected by a sand quarry which has essentially removed one of the local mountains.
In 2008 Yuri (Melini) received a call from a local priest, Fr. Elias stating that the community were under pressure because of their resistence to the quarry. Children were getting sick because of the constant dust, sore throat complaints were on the rise, the food was always covered in dust and the lorries were up and down the street all the time. In addition, the woods, where people had been able to send their children to play and which were a resource for the whole community, were simply being eliminated.
Yuri helped them with legal and communications advice and moral support.
