Attacks on Human Rights Defenders: A Daily Occurrence in Latin America
By Emilio Godoy
Some 50 human rights defenders from Latin America held a meeting at the Journalists
Club in Mexico City to exchange strategies and analyse the challenges they face in the
most lethal region for activists. Special rapporteurs on indigenous peoples, displaced
persons and freedom of expression attended the meeting. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS
MEXICO CITY, Feb 20 2019 (IPS) - “We’re in a very difficult situation. There is militarisation at a regional level, and gender-based violence. We are at risk, we cannot silence that,” Aura Lolita Chávez, an indigenous woman from Guatemala, complained at a meeting of human rights defenders from Latin America held in the Mexican capital.
The Quiché indigenous activist and leader of the K’iche’s People’s Council for the Defence of Life, Mother Nature, Land and Territory, told IPS that the Guatemalan government “has said that we are violent trouble-makers, but we defend our territory and we say no to the mining companies.”
Chávez, who was a finalist for the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2017, and winner of the Ignacio Ellacuría Prize of the Basque Agency for Development Cooperation that same year, is an organiser of the opposition by native communities in western Guatemala against mining companies, hydroelectric dams and African oil palm producers.
She has received death threats and attacks that forced her to seek refuge in Spain in 2017.