IDEALS

GUATEMALA CITY, (Aug. 12, 2009) IPS/GIN – Indigenous women in
Guatemala suffer discrimination and ill-treatment on a daily basis
because there are no laws to protect the rights of domestic
employees, although they contribute to higher standards of living
for the families that employ them.

“What really hurt was that they refused me my right to rest before
and after I had my baby. Even when my contractions started, they
wouldn’t let me go to the hospital,” said Mildred D¡az, a
Guatemalan domestic employee, talking about the worst aspects of
her job.

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GUATEMALA CITY, (Aug. 19, 2009) IPS/GIN – Byron Ranulfo Rustri n
was just 12 years old. He loved playing football and was a good
student. On Jul. 23, a group of youngsters he didn’t know invited
him to play a match and he agreed, but it was a trap: he was
kidnapped and his body turned up five days later.

His family made two ransom payments totaling 15,000 dollars. But
it didn’t secure his release. Byron’s body was found on Jul. 28 in
a suitcase. He had apparently been strangled.

A total of 109 kidnapping cases were reported to the security
forces in Guatemala in the first six months of the year, while
seven people have died in the ransom negotiations, according to the
police. Read the rest of this entry →

GUATEMALA CITY, (Aug. 18, 2009) IPS/GIN – “Femicide,” or
gender-based murder, has reached epidemic proportions in Guatemala.
But at least for Rosmery Gonz†lez – one of the more than 700
Guatemalan victims of this crime in 2008 – justice is finally being
done with the arrest of her alleged killer earlier this month.

On Aug. 6, scar Romero, the 19-year-old victim’s uncle, who was
the leading suspect in her murder since she turned up dead in July
of last year, was taken into police custody from his home in a poor
district of the capital. Read the rest of this entry →

GUATEMALA CITY, (May 18, 2010) IPS/GIN – In March 1982, when he
was just 10 years old, Jes£s Tec£ witnessed the slaughter of his
family and hundreds of other people in R°o Negro, a remote village
in the province of Baja Verapaz in Guatemala’s central plateau
region, north of the capital.

The string of massacres of native villagers in that area by
government forces and paramilitary groups in the early 1980s became
one of the most high profile cases after a peace agreement brought
the civil war to an end in 1996. Read the rest of this entry →

GUATEMALA CITY, (Mar. 22, 2010) IPS/GIN – Stepped-up efforts
against drug trafficking in Colombia and Mexico are increasingly
driving drug mafias into Central America, where drug-related
corruption and violence are on the rise.

President lvaro Colom of Guatemala, which borders Mexico to the
south, recently summed the problem up like this: “When (Mexican)
President (Felipe) Calderon has a success, I have a problem.” Read the rest of this entry →

GUATEMALA CITY, (Jun. 16, 2009) IPS/GIN – The government’s budget
cuts for Guatemala’s 333 municipal administrations are hitting
rural areas hard, resulting in incomplete infrastructural projects
and layoffs for teachers and municipal employees.

With the $125 million budget cut decided in May, the total annual
budget for municipal governments this year will be equal to that
of 2008, President lvaro Colom’s first year in office: around $500
million (compared to a total municipal budget of $405 million in
2007 and $403 million in 2006).

“A highway in the village of Pacom¢n and several schools in the
district of San Sebasti†n Central will not be built now,”
complained Sacapulas Mayor Pedro Pu of the right-wing Guatemalan
Republican Front (FRG), the party headed by former dictator Efrain
Rios Montt. Read the rest of this entry →

GUATEMALA CITY, (Jun. 24, 2009) IPS/GIN – Veteran television
reporter Rolando Santiz was on his way to downtown Guatemala City
on Apr. 1 when two gunmen on a motorcycle drove up alongside his
car and killed him in a rain of gunfire. The photographer driving
with him was wounded but miraculously survived.

Santiz was the first of two journalists killed this year in
Guatemala. Another television reporter, Marco Antonio Estrada, was
also shot by an unidentified gunman while working in the eastern
city of Chiquimula, near the border with Honduras, on Jun. 6. Read the rest of this entry →

GUATEMALA CITY, (Mar. 18, 2010) IPS/GIN – Civil society groups in
Guatemala say a court decision authorizing former Guatemalan
president Alfonso Portillo’s extradition to the United States is
just a first step in a lengthy process.

Portillo (2000-2004) lost the first round in the legal battle he
is facing in connection with the laundering of tens of millions of
dollars when a court accepted the U.S. request for his extradition,
after a nearly 12-hour hearing Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry →

SAN SALVADOR, (Mar. 12, 2010) IPS/GIN – Guatemala and El Salvador
have a terrible record in terms of compliance with the
recommendations and sentences handed down by the inter-American
human rights bodies on cases involving appalling abuses like forced
disappearance, torture and massacres committed during the armed
conflicts in the two Central American countries.

Since the peace agreements that brought the civil wars to an end
- in 1992 in El Salvador and 1996 in Guatemala – governments in
both countries have been resistant to implementing the
recommendations and rulings issued by the Washington-based
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and the Costa
Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Read the rest of this entry →

GUATEMALA CITY, (Mar. 13, 2010) IPS/GIN – “This is a time of great
tension because we know that at any moment, when we least expect
it, our lives can be cut short at a stroke,” Tito G†lvez, a leader
in the Resistance Front for the Defence of Natural Resources and
Rights of the Guatemalan Peoples (FRENA), told IPS.

Two of G†lvez’s fellow activists, Evelinda Ram°rez and Octavio
Roblero, were among four human rights workers murdered so far this
year in this country, where even today, defending civil liberties
is a life-and-death matter. Read the rest of this entry →