Category Archives: Indigenous peoples

Land rights defender Leocadio Juracán arrested in Guatemala

Jim Hodgson

Friends and allies of Leocadio Juracán, Agrarian Reform Coordinator of the Campesino Committee of the Highlands (CCDA), are protesting his arrest Wednesday as he was about to fly to South Africa for an international conference.

“He is being criminalized for his work as a land and human rights defender,” said the Maritimes-Guatemala Breaking The Silence Network (BTS) in an urgent action request. He faces multiple charges, including aggravated trespass (usurpación agravada), directly related to his advocacy for Indigenous and farming communities across Guatemala.

(More details of the urgent action request and of Leocadio’s arrest follow below.)

Leocadio continued talking with reporters even as police escorted him from the airport and into a waiting room vehicle. Right: details of the conference he was to attend in South Africa.

I worked with Leocadio and other members of CCDA in May 2022 and March 2023, travelling with them to communities in Quiché and Izabal departments that face threats from people or companies purporting to be the true land-owners. In those communities and in scores of others across Guatemala, CCDA works with Indigenous and small-farmer communities to document their history on the land and to submit legal justification for their claims.

Leocadio and other CCDA members are known in many parts of Canada because they work with coffee farmers whose product is sent to roasters linked to Café Justicia in British Columbia and Just Us! in Atlantic Canada in a “fair trade plus” arrangement.

More details of the BTS Urgent Action request (including a template for letters in Spanish):

On August 13, Leocadio Juracán, Agrarian Reform Coordinator of the Campesino Committee of the Highlands (CCDA), was detained at La Aurora Airport as he was leaving the country to participate in a Translocal Social Movement Learning conference in South Africa. 

Leocadio is being criminalized for his work as a land and human rights defender. He is currently facing multiple charges, including Aggravated Trespass (usurpación), directly related to his advocacy for Indigenous and campesino communities.

We need your immediate action:

With the following Canadian officials copied:

In your message, please call on them to:

  • Ensure his protection until such time as he is released.
  • Follow recent UN Special Rapporteur advice to enact an immediate moratorium on evictions and grant amnesty for all criminalized land defenders.
  • End criminalization of the members and leadership of Indigenous and campesino communities and organizations.

Many of these government officials are Spanish speaking. If possible, write this letter in Spanish. Otherwise, you can also send it in English.

If you’d like to send it in Spanish, you may say:

Me dirijo a usted para exigir que:

  • Liberen inmediatamente a Leocadio Juracán.
  • Garanticen su protección hasta el momento de su liberación.
  • Sigan las recomendaciones recientes del Relator Especial de la ONU de declarar una moratoria inmediata de los desalojos forzados y de otorgar la amnistía a todos los defensores criminalizados.
  • Pongan fin a la criminalización de los miembros y líderes de las comunidades y organizaciones indígenas y campesinas.

After you write this email, please share with several of your friends and contacts. Thank you so much for your urgent support to help get Leocadio Juracán free.

Leocadio Juracán, March 21, 2023, speaking with the people of an Indigenous Q’eqchi’ community known as Macho Creek near Guatemala’s Atlantic coast. (Photo: Jim Hodgson)

Leocadio Juracán, campesino leader and former congress member, arrested

Prensa Comunitaria

Leocadio Juracán Salome, leader of the Highlands Committee of Small Farmers (CCDA), was detained Wednesday morning (Aug. 13) at La Aurora Airport in the Guatemalan capital as he was preparing to travel to South Africa for an international conference.

According to his defense attorneys, the crimes for which Juracán was arrested are aggravated trespass (usurpación agravada) and causing forest fires.

“Today, as I was preparing to travel to participate in this conference, I was arbitrarily detained at approximately 11:05 a.m. at La Aurora International Airport,” said the former congress member from the now-defunct Convergencia party.

Juracán asked his family to remain calm and told his fellow CCDA members that he is proud of their struggles “because these repressive practices by the State and corrupt officials only demonstrate that they cannot stop our just struggles with criminalization alone.”

The news of his arrest has generated expressions of solidarity from various individuals and sectors. The CCDA, the organization of which he is a member, stated that this arrest is an act of criminalization and prosecution against those who defend land, territory, and social justice and demanded his immediate release.

Representative and campesino leader

When he was elected representative for Convergencia (2015-2019), Juracán supported campesino organizations and other social sectors in their demands. In March 2017, along with then-representative Sandra Morán, he filed a preliminary lawsuit against former President Jimmy Morales in the Hogar Seguro case, which was unsuccessful.

Juracán remains one of the representatives of the CCDA, an organization dedicated to promoting rural development for Indigenous and small-farmer communities. Founded in 1982 during the military dictatorships, the organization was formally established in 1989.

Currently, CCDA supports Indigenous communities and land defenders facing issues of eviction and criminalization in several departments of the country, including El Estor, Izabal, and Cobán, Alta Verapaz. …

"Another World is Possible," World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brasil (2005)

Pope Francis and Our Common Home

By Jim Hodgson

On this Earth Day, I want to share with you a reflection by Bishop Francisco Duque of the Anglican Church in Colombia. I worked with him in a larger team in one period (already a dozen years or more ago) of ecumenical efforts for peace with justice in Colombia. 

Indeed, it was during that work that I stood with friends in a coffee shop in Bogotá and watched news of the election of the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, as pope on March 13, 2013.  I did not rejoice. All that I knew of Bergoglio was that he had opposed several of the initiatives of the governments of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández as it expanded sex education in public schools and legalized same-sex marriage in 2010.

Images of St. Francis. Left: preaching to the birds. Right: “Make me an instrument of your peace / Bless your people, Lord” is one I saw in Real de Catorce, San Luis de Potosí, in October 2024.

But Pope Francis surprised me: first by choosing to be known by the name Francis, signalling he would follow St. Francis of Assisi, long admired for his inspiration to contemporary ecological commitment and for initiating dialogue with Muslim leaders during Christian Europe’s “crusades” in the Middle East. And then he surprised me again with steps that showed respect for LGBTQIA+ people: first, “Who am I to judge?”, and later with his openness to diverse voices heard through synods, his advocacy for peace, the rights of migrants and debt forgiveness. I can only wish he had done more with regard to the rights of women and pray that his successor can go further.

In Canada, Pope Francis will undoubtedly be remembered most for his “penitential pilgrimage” and encounters with Indigenous peoples in 2022. Despite resistance from most of Canada’s Catholic bishops, he came, offered a (not fully accepted) apology, and gave truth and reconciliation efforts a dramatic push forward in public awareness.

But I think his lasting global legacy will be his way of holding faithful action for social justice and action for ecological justice together coherently. Here’s what Bishop Duque had to say.

Left: Bishop Duque at a Methodist assembly in Medellín in 2012. Right: Pope Francis meets representatives of social movements in 2024.

Francis, pope of Amazonia and our common home

Francisco Duque

The world mourns the loss of a spiritual leader who transcended borders, creeds and generations. Pope Francis not only was the first Latin American pontiff. He was, above all, the pope of the Amazon and caretaker of our Common Home. His legacy, immense and profoundly humanist, will remain inscribed in the planet’s memory as a prophetic voice that urges us to hear the clamour of the earth and the cry of the poor as a single call.

From the time of the publication of his encyclical Laudato Si’ in 2015, Pope Francis illuminated the ways of global ecological awareness. With valiant and committed language, he denounced the structural causes of environmental collapse, unlimited resource extraction, climate injustice and indifference toward the suffering of communities that are most vulnerable, especially those who live in the lungs of the world: tropical forests, the Amazon in particular. 

His spiritual leadership was also political and ethical. He convened scientists, Indigenous leaders, activists and religious authorities from around the world to make a new pact between humanity and nature. He promoted an integral ecology that did not separate the environment from the social. He recognized in Indigenous peoples that they are millennial guardians of wisdom. His encouragement of the Synod of the Amazon in 2019 marked a before and after: Amazonia was heard in the heart of the Vatican, not as a forgotten periphery but as a vital centre for the future of the planet.

From the Inter-Religious Initiative for the Tropical Forests (IRI-Colombia), we hold up a prayer of gratitude and hope. Gratitude for his strong words, for his planetary vision, for having returned to the faith its active dimension of protection of creation. Hope because the fertile seeds he planted will continue to bear fruit in the struggles of those who do not resign ourselves to ecocide or silence in the face of injustice.

Pope Francis leaves us a road map for humanity. There will not be peace without environmental justice. There will be no future without forests. There will be no reconciliation without a deep ecological conversion. His legacy challenges governments, businesses, religions and people. His voice remains alive, inspiring a global inter-religious movement that is committed to life. In these days of farewell, we echo his own question, charged with urgency and tenderness:

“What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us, to children who are now growing up?” (LS 160).?”

Thank you, Pope Francis, for reminding us that care for Amazonia is an act of faith, love and justice.

Almost a decade later, truth still elusive in case of the 43 students in Guerrero, Mexico 

They’ve been gone for almost 10 years now, those 43 education students who were taken one night in Iguala, Guerrero. Hypotheses abound but despite promises and investigations, the crime is not solved. 

But there are new revelations about the cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of the Mexican state in weeks after the disappearance (see below).

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known popularly as AMLO) has done many good things as he nears completion of his six-year term. But his failure to press finally for the full truth of the Mexican army’s involvement in the disappearance of the students who attended the Ayotzinapa teachers training school stains his record. 

“A decade of failure,” says a headline in the Mexico City daily newspaper, La Jornada. Students, teachers and family members say their struggle will continue.

During a march in Mexico City on Monday, Aug. 27, Luz María Telumbre, mother of one of the disappeared students, told a reporter that she would be among the parents who would meet the president again the following day. This time, she said, it will be to say: “’thanks for nothing’ because we’re still walking, shouting in the streets for justice and truth.”

Another mother, Joaquína García, said “it isn’t fair that we should be in the streets for 10 years seeking justice and we still don’t know anything about the boys.” She added that she wants to tell the next president, Claudia Sheinbaum, “that we will not stop struggling until we find them and that as a woman and mother, we hope she will understand us.”

On the night of Sept. 26, 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School were attacked in Iguala, Guerrero, after they had commandeered buses to travel onward to Mexico City for a protest over the Oct. 2, 1968, massacre of student protesters at Tlatelolco plaza in Mexico City.

In Iguala, six people—including three students—were killed in the assault, 25 were injured and 43 students were abducted and presumably murdered later. Leading suspects are members of the Mexican army who worked alongside municipal officials and drug-traffickers who were trying to move opium gum (semi-processed heroin) on one of the buses that was taken.

What happened before?

One afternoon in the late 1990s, I accompanied a group of students from Canada and the United States to a meeting with rural teachers in the mountains near Tlapa in northeast Guerrero.

These teachers spoke for communities afflicted by poverty, military incursions and the drug war. They taught their students in Spanish as well as in Nahuatl or one of the other Indigenous languages spoken in the area. They dedicated their lives to strengthening rural communities through the education of children. They were convinced that people needed to be able to organize themselves and demand that their rights be respected so that things would begin to change.

“The rural teachers colleges are among the only means of social mobility within the reach of young people from campesino communities,” wrote Luis Hernández Navarro, opinion editor at La Jornada, back in 2011. “Through them, they have access to education, housing, food and later, with luck, a job they are qualified to do.” 

The first time I that I can recall hearing of the Ayotzinapa school was in January 2008, when Blanche Petrich, another La Jornada journalist, came to Toronto to support work by Canadian churches in defense of refugees from Mexico. She told us:

“To describe the panorama of repression in Guerrero, it’s enough to follow the route of the popular movement. ‘Wherever there is organization, protest, defense of human rights, mobilization of roadblocks, there is repression, irregular apprehensions and arrest warrants,’ we’re told by the [Tlachinollan] human rights organization in the La Montaña area, led by Abel Barrera. That is, the campesinos who oppose the taking of their lands for a dam in La Perota, close to Acapulco, the ecologists who resist cutting of trees in the Petatlán sierra, the laid-off workers of a government office in the state capital of Chipalcingo, the community leaders of Xochistlaguaca, the students at the normal school in Ayotzinapa: they all suffer persecution.”

And what’s new?

Through an access to information request, journalists obtained new information about the cover-up that was orchestrated after the abductions by high ranking authorities in the government during meetings presided over by then-President Enrique Peña Nieto and attended by then-Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam and other officials. Their “historic truth” version—since proven false—contended that local police turned the students over to a drug gang which murdered them, burned the bodies at a garbage dump, and put the remains into a river.

AP photo and story (left) about revelations by a former senior official; a tweet by the Fábrica de Periodismo about the cover-up led by high officials of the previous Mexican government.

Tomás Zerón, former head of investigations for Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office, is now a fugitive hiding in Israel, beyond the reach of the Mexican justice system. But in 2022, he answered questions posed in writing by Alejandro Encinas, then Mexico’s Interior Undersecretary for Human Rights.

Appointed by AMLO’s government, Encinas chaired the Commission for Truth and Access to Justice in the Ayotzinapa Case (COVAJ). The commission included family members and their advisors. Their report, published in August 2022, said federal, state and municipal politicians, along with the armed forces and local police, knew what had happened. 

But that report and a subsequent one in September 2023 have been undermined by the refusal of President López Obrador to accept its conclusions and his accusations against the human rights groups that accompany the families, including Tlachinollan and the Jesuit-backed Miguel Augustín Pro Human Rights Centre.

Left: La Jornada story Tuesday with headlines (adding my own details): federal prosecutors may call former president Ernesto Peña Nieto to testify about Ayotzinapa; AMLO: “I don’t protect anybody.” Below the photo, the text says that AMLO has also called on Zerón “to clarify his position because he is accused of coordinating the torturers.” Right: story today about the last of the parents’ meetings with AMLO.

After a meeting Tuesday (Aug. 27) with the president, the parents said it was the last one they would hold with him before he leaves office Oct. 1. 

“We ended badly,” said their lawyer, Vidulfo Rosales of Tlachinollan. He added that while in the first three years of this government, they saw clear good will to get to the truth, in 2022, the situation changed. “This is when we touched the sensitive fibres of the Mexican Army; we could advance no further. There was a break, a crisis, including in the relationship, the dialogue.”

“This government, unfortunately, could not give us truth and justice,” he added.