Guatemala

In a letter to Guatemalan national authorities, 115 organizations from 39 countries demanded a halt to the abuses and violence that palm oil company Industria Chiquibul has been committing in indigenous and peasant communities. The organizations also called for suspension of the RSPO certification process, which they denounce as greenwashing a destructive industry.

We call on organizations to sign this petition in support of the Mayan Q’eqchi community Santa Elena in the northern region of Guatemala. The community is asking for international and national support in the face of recent threats and growing criminalization by Industria Chiquibul, a palm company that supplies palm oil to transnational corporations such as Nestle and Unilever. Read and sign the letter below.

We share the final statement where they express their demands and claims.

The false idea that industrial plantations are a solution to the climate crisis is a golden opportunity for investment funds like Arbaro, which access scarce climate funding for expanding destructive monocultures.

One of the main causes of deforestation in Mesoamerica is the expansion of oil palm monoculture. An exchange of experiences brought together representatives from indigenous and peasant communities to coordinate their resistance.

Only available in Spanish.

The Palmas del Ixcán company has used multiple tactics to grab land, as well as a deceptive RSPO certification process and the use of “independent producers.” Despite criminalization of communities, their resistance grows ever stronger.

In the Yich K’isis region of Guatemala, the construction of three hydroelectric dams has been planned: Pojom I, Pojom II and San Andrés. These dams will receive water by diverting the Negro, Pojom, Yalwitz Primavera, Varsovia and Palmira rivers. Communities are struggling to resist the imposition of these dams; this led to the death of a community member in 2017. A short video from the Avispa Midia news portal shares the voices of the women and men in the struggle to defend their territories and lives.

Before, conservation organizations were focused on raising money to create protected areas in forests supposedly threatened with destruction; today, they constitute a bona fide transnational “industry” that manages and controls areas that go far beyond forests.

The creation of the Maya Biosphere Reserve has been legitimizing a destructive model: infrastructure and energy projects, hand-in-hand with Protected Areas “without people.” While conservation NGOs fatten their portfolios, peasant and indigenous communities are displaced, or conditioned to depend on NGOs and the market.

This bulletin, on International Women's Day, is a call for direct and radical solidarity with those women who suffer, resist, organize and mobilize against the daily violence and abuse that industrial plantations cause.

Contamination of water sources, deplorable working conditions, and sexual blackmail in exchange for work, are some of the kinds of violence against women living in and around oil palm plantations in Guatemala and Colombia.