Eruptions
Let’s imagine a world without them.
Everyday, another one comes. We will not list here — we refuse to list here — the continued atrocities, attacks, threats, and distractions offered up daily, hourly by despotic leaders in the U.S. and around the world.
Media bombardment makes us feel like the eruptions are constant. That they are, if we are paying attention.
The eruptions are also connected.
On May 9, Luis Arturo Marroquín was murdered by unidentified assailants in San Luis Jilotepeque, Guatemala. Over the next month, six more community leaders were murdered, all members of Comité de Desarrollo Campesino (CODECA) or Comité Campesino del Altiplano / Peasant Farmers Committee of the Highlands (CCDA).
In this area, forced displacement has been occurring frequently over the past three years, even though many community members have legit land titles. CCDA shared,
“Land remains an axis of accumulation of wealth and useful means for the development of harmful economic activities such as agro-industry, extractive mega-projects, large-scale livestock operations, and illicit activities such as drug trafficking.”
Community leaders had been receiving threats against their lives and were facing criminalization for their organizing work.
Guatemala carries a terrible trend when it comes to the vulnerability of human rights defenders. Outside of police or military shootings at protests, one rights defender has been killed in Guatemala every month or two all the way back to 2000.
Though not new to Guatemala, or to our partner CCDA, it was a devastating eruption of violence. In fact, the eruption of violence against environmental defenders is a growing, disturbing global trend.
On June 3, Volcán de Fuego, Guatemala’s most active volcano, erupted — literally. Lava and ash spewed from the earth and continued its fast descent, with at least 110 lives lost, nearly 200 people missing (although those on the ground state that these numbers are far higher), and over 12,000 people forced to evacuate, over 1.7 million people affected. More than 4,000 people remain homeless with most survivors living in temporary shelters.
Our partners are always first responders — in disaster response, in coming up with solutions to immediate and endemic problems, and in addressing the root causes of those problems.
Thousands marched and protested on June 9 through the streets of Guatemala City to demand the resignation of President Jimmy Morales who claimed that there were no funds available for emergency relief. Government support so far has not only been inadequate, but militarized and often inappropriate. Women’s needs are particularly ignored. International attention (and thus aid) has also now waned. The Guatemalan Congress has been criticized for using the national tragedy as a smokescreen to push through unpopular laws, such as a “right to life” bill that sets penalties for non-therapeutic abortions and prohibits same-sex marriage, and another that would end prosecutions and investigations of crimes against humanity during Guatemala’s armed conflict.
For those needing long-term relocation and rebuilding, the eruption of Volcán de Fuego remains devastating.
Over 1,000 miles north of the Volcán, along a border people long to cross, having fled a place no longer tenable, livable, safe, militarization is at play as well.
On the border between Mexico and the U.S., 65 children a day are being separated from their parents as part of the administration’s “zero tolerance” deterrence policy for people fleeing to the United States. Most of the migrant families at the southern U.S. border come from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
The Department of Homeland Security contracts with 100 shelters located in 17 states to house the separated children. Some of biggest centers are in McAllen and Brownsville, both in Texas, and Estrella del Norte in Tucson, Arizona. On June 19, the Associated Press published a disturbing report about the existence of at least three “tender age” shelters in South Texas, located in Combes, Raymondville, and Brownsville.
Yet they come.
In asylum proceedings in the United States, women and children from Guatemala frequently cite endemic family and domestic violence, and neglect from the local police who do not respond to their phone calls or who cannot speak their Indigenous languages. Since October 2017, the current administration has pushed for tighter asylum rules as part of any legislative package on immigration. On June 11, the US attorney general narrowed the definition of asylum-seeking stating that those “pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by nongovernmental actors will not qualify for asylum.”
People are coming from areas that have also been battered by a changing climate, frequent natural disasters, and droughts. The poverty in these regions leaves residents with little ability for resilience in the face of unpredictable rains or external events.
Of course Central Americans traveling to the US is not a new phenomena. One piece of information lacking in media narratives is the decades of US intervention in destabilizing and fueling civil unrest in the region, going back to the Banana Wars in the 1900s. As immigrant rights activist and former labor organizer David Bacon highlights in his article, “U.S. Policies Drive Migration from Central America,” migration from Central America increased at the height of the Cold War:
“The tide of migration from Central America goes back to wars that the United States promoted in the 1980s, in which the U.S. armed the forces most opposed to progressive social change. Two million Salvadorans alone came to the United States during the late 1970s and ’80s, as did Guatemalans and Nicaraguans. Whole families migrated, but so did parts of families, leaving loved ones behind with the hope that someday they would be reunited…
“Growing migration is a consequence of the increasing economic crisis for rural people in Central America and Mexico. People are leaving because they can’t survive where they are.”
Families have been severed. Childhoods have been ended. Notions of protection imprinted on young souls have been irreparably destroyed by state actors. A brutal force before used outside its borders, enacts its geopolitical evil closer to home.
State-sponsored violence is enacted on brown and Black people, with devastating eruptions among families, communities, entire societies.
The leaving. Eruptions.
The violence. Eruptions.
All part of a tectonic plate that is shifting in the world right now. In each of these three ongoing events, governments using conflict and violence as their primary tool. For demanding their rights, environmental defenders are held captive and murdered by state-sanctioned goons. For being in the path of a volcano, people are held captive in shelters controlled by the military, unable to come and go. For fleeing places where they cannot imagine a future, parents’ children are torn from them by law enforcement officers who use military tactics and equipment.
The militarization. Eruptions.
The corporate profits to be made. Eruptions.
And we can resist it.
With our eruptions of courage, joy, outrage, love, attention, giving, voting, singing, dancing, opening, understanding, growing, sharing!
Though we can’t stop natural disasters, we can reimagine a world without eruptions that destroy our humanity.
Local, grassroots organizations are first responders to eruptions of any kind.
CCDA in its immediate response to the assassination of the community leaders, mobilized to protect and take care of the fallen’s families, as well as activate all legal channels to investigate the murders.
CCDA, AFEDES and ISMUGUA all opened collection centers for immediate relief, including distribution of food, clothing, personal items, and medicine. CONAVIGUA, the Guatemalan member of the Women’s Commission of Central America, have organized a mobile clinic that will have a doctor, a health promoter and a midwife go to different shelters and communities.
All are part of planning in the intermediate and long-term rebuilding efforts, healing and creating resilient communities in Guatemala.
We aspire to step up the way our partners have. Thousand Currents has given additional funding to each of our partners in Central America.
Growing our support for our partners at this time. Eruptions.
Join us for an online gathering on Tuesday, August 21st to connect the dots between the U.S. migration crisis, and the climate, land, and sociopolitical crises affecting our partners in Guatemala and beyond. Click the graphic for more details. You can RSVP here.
If you want to learn more about our partners in Central America, or how you can support them, contact Jessie Spector, Director of Donor Organizing, or Katherine Zavala, Latin America Regional Director.
