Category Archives: Guatemala

US-made guns are ripping Central America apart and driving migration north | Ioan Grillo

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An iron river of illegal guns flows from the US to Mexico, Central America, and across the hemisphere

The stray bullet from the gang fight struck Katery Ramos when she was 12 years old, playing on the dirt street in the poor Planeta neighbourhood of San Pedro Sula, Honduras. “I was standing up for a moment, afterwards I fell,” she told me, sitting with her mother in a scrubby field near her home.

Related: Biden strikes international deal in bid to stop migrants reaching US border

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Mexico’s vow to tighten border fails to deter US-bound migrants

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As the Biden administration enlists its neighbours in attempts to slow the flow of people, families seeking a future free from hunger and violence journey on

Groups of men, women and children stepped off small boats and on to Mexican soil without showing their documents to anyone.

Drivers quickly bundled them into taxis which sped past an immigration office to a nearby crossroad, where the travelers climbed into a vans for the next leg of their journey toward the US border.

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Mexican troops seized by villagers after Guatemalan man killed at a checkpoint

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Soldiers, three vehicles and 17 guns released after Mexican officials agreed to economic reparations and legal proceedings

Fifteen Mexican troops were held for hours by angry villagers in a remote border zone and held captive for hours after one of the soldiers shot and killed a Guatemalan citizen at a checkpoint.

The Mexican defense secretary, Luis Cresencio Sandoval, said on Tuesday that the events stemmed from “an erroneous reaction on the part of military personnel” who fired on a vehicle reversing away from a checkpoint on Monday.

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Abandoned: gangs in Guatemala replace families – photo essay

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Decades of migration to the US left generations of children behind for whom gangs are substitute families

Photographs and text by Ignacio Marin

Since she arrived in Guatemala City a few decades ago, she has lived in the same humble home. Between bare concrete walls and under a tin roof, she raised three children. Now Berenice is raising her 15-year-old grandson since his mother left for the US and his father was murdered.

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‘Blindsided’: Biden faces tough test in reversing Trump’s cruel border legacy

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As unaccompanied children reach the US, Republicans seek political gain. The White House has a fight on its hands

Lauded for his human touch, Joe Biden is facing an early political and moral test over how his government treats thousands of migrant children who make the dangerous journey to America alone.

Related: Is there a crisis at the border? Advocates in Texas say it's 'political manipulation'

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Is there a crisis at the border? Advocates in Texas say it’s ‘political manipulation’

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The Texas governor has sent troops to fortify the border while advocates say the immigration numbers are being politicized

Along the winding road which follows the Rio Grande west from Mission, Texas, dozens of armed border patrol agents, state troopers, soldiers and state and local police are dotted about to catch undocumented migrants entering the country from Mexico.

This is a so-called hotspot for irregular migration – folks crossing the border river without permission to enter the US – in what the Republican party and anti-immigrant activists are calling a crisis at the border. During one afternoon this week, there were more law enforcement vehicles cruising along this dusty 15-mile stretch towards Los Ebanos, a tiny border community connected to Mexico by a hand-operated cable ferry, than there was local traffic.

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Missing Guatemalan woman’s family urges Mexico to solve killings of 19 suspected migrants

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The family is providing DNA samples to Mexican authorities to help investigators identify the remains found in Tamaulipas

The family of a young Guatemalan woman believed to be among 19 victims of a massacre in northern Mexico is urging the Mexican government to bring those responsible to justice.

State prosecutors in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state said there were at least two Guatemalans among the bodies found. The attorney general’s office said in a statement that investigators had so far genetically identified four of the dead with the aid of their families.

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The migrants Trump forced Mexico to stop: Ada Trillo’s best photograph

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‘Trump had threatened Mexico with tariffs if it let in this caravan from Honduras. Two hours after crossing this river, many were teargassed then deported’

I had been following a migrant caravan north from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, for around 10 days. It was 23 January 2020, and this was the moment the group crossed the Suchiate river, which divides Guatemala from Mexico.

The Mexican authorities had deployed the national guard to stop the caravan entering their country because Trump had threatened to increase tariffs on Mexican goods coming into the United States if they let migrants in. Previously, migrants had been allowed to traverse the length of Mexico with no problem.

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Guatemalan security forces block Honduran migrant caravan heading to US – video

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Guatemalan security forces blocked hundreds of migrants advancing towards the US on Monday.

The government said the road in eastern Guatemala reopened to traffic on Monday after troops and police officers launched teargas and pushed them  back down the highway.

Security forces closed in on the migrants just beyond the village of Vado Hondo, some 55km from the borders of Honduras and El Salvador.

The removal of the group was the latest effort by Guatemalan authorities to break up the caravan, which authorities said numbered close to 8,000 people ,within hours of its departure for the US last week.

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Migrant caravan trekking north to US border clashes with Guatemalan troops

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  • Honduran migrants began crossing Guatemalan border Friday
  • Troops use teargas, shields and sticks to repel weary travellers

Truncheon-wielding Guatemalan troops have clashed with Central American asylum seekers trying to push their way north towards the US border as Donald Trump’s presidency entered its final days.

Thousands of mostly Honduran migrants began crossing the Guatemalan border on Friday night, having set off on foot from the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula in the early hours of Thursday.

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Guatemala mine’s ex-security chief convicted of Indigenous leader’s murder

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  • Mynor Padilla pleaded guilty over death of Adolfo Ich in 2009
  • Mining firms accused of litany of abuses in Central America

A judge in Guatemala has accepted a guilty plea by the former head of security at Central America’s largest nickel mine who was on trial for killing an Indigenous leader, in a rare conviction over human rights violations allegedly linked to Canadian-owned mining companies in the region.

Mynor Padilla was found guilty on Wednesday of homicide for the 2009 fatal shooting of Adolfo Ich, a Maya Q’eqchi’ teacher and community leader who opposed the Fenix mine outside the town of El Estor.

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Guatemala protesters set congress on fire – video report

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Hundreds of protesters broke into Guatemala’s congress and set fire to part of the building amid growing protests against education and health budget cuts.

They are calling on the president, Alejandro Giammattei, to step down and were angered after legislators approved almost £50,000 to pay for meals for themselves, but reduced spending on coronavirus patients and human rights agencies

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Guatemala protesters set congress on fire during budget protests

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Public anger targets President Alejandro Giammattei over cuts to education and health

Hundreds of protesters broke into Guatemala’s congress and burned part of the building amid growing demonstrations against President Alejandro Giammattei and the legislature for approving a budget that cut educational and health spending.

The incident on Saturday came as about 10,000 people were protesting in front of the National Palace in Guatemala City against corruption and the budget, which protesters say was negotiated and passed by legislators in secret while the Central American country was distracted by the fallout of back-to-back hurricanes and the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Protesters set fire to Guatemala’s Congress building

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7,000 demonstrate against health and education cuts amid Covid and hurricane crises

Hundreds of protesters broke into Guatemala’s Congress and burned part of the building on Saturday amid growing demonstrations against president Alejandro Giammattei and the legislature for approving a budget that cut educational and health spending.

The protest came as about 7,000 people were demonstrating in front of the National Palace in Guatemala City against the budget, which protesters say was negotiated and passed by legislators in secret while the Central American country was distracted by the fallout of back-to-back hurricanes and the Covid-19 pandemic.

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‘Overwhelming’: Central America braces for new storms in wake of Hurricane Eta

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Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala worst affected with scores dead and more than 200,000 people evacuated from their homes

Central America is braced for further storms this weekend as the region reels from the devastation caused by Hurricane Eta, the Red Cross has warned.

Forecasters believe a weather front forming in the Caribbean has a 90% chance of becoming a cyclone, making it the 30th named Atlantic storm of 2020 in a record-breaking hurricane season, shattering the previous worst year of 28 storms in 2005.

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Storm Eta death toll rises to 100 after devastating mudslides

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Rescuers reach remote mountain village in Guatemala where people were buried in their homes

The death toll from the calamitous Storm Eta in Central America soared on Friday after the Guatemalan military reached a remote mountainous village where torrential rains had triggered devastating mudslides, killing about 100 people.

Many of the dead were buried in their homes in the remote village of Quejá in the central region of Alta Verapaz, where about 150 houses had been swallowed by mudslides, said army spokesman Rubén Téllez.

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Thousands of migrants cross into Guatemala with slim hopes of reaching US

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The caravan from Honduras is the biggest since the pandemic hit Central America in March, triggering a rise in unemployment and poverty

Thousands of Honduran migrants hoping to reach the United States have entered Guatemala, testing the newly reopened frontier that had been shut by the coronavirus pandemic.

Authorities had planned to register the migrants as they crossed and offer assistance to those willing to turn back, but early on Thursday, the group pushed past armed guards without registering. By midday more than 3,000 migrants had crossed illegally, said Guatemalan officials.

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La Caravana del Diablo: a migrant caravan in Mexico – photo essay

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Photojournalist Ada Luisa Trillo has won the Guardian’s Portfolio Review award at Format photography festival this year. Her powerful piece of work on the migrant caravan follows the people who left Central American countries to reach the US

In January 2020, fleeing violence and poor economic conditions, a group of Hondurans organised a huge migrant caravan that travelled through Guatemala into Mexico. After travelling for eight days, the caravan crossed the Suchiate River into Mexico and were met by the recently established Guardia Nacional composed of former federal, military and naval police.

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Covid outbreak exposes dire conditions at Guatemala factory making US brands

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More than 200 workers tested positive at garment factory supplying Amazon, Gap and American Eagle

A garment factory supplying Gap, American Eagle and Amazon was at the centre of one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in Guatemala, the Guardian can reveal.

More than 200 people tested positive for Covid-19 at the KP Textil factory, exposing the dire working conditions inside the country’s maquila system of free trade zones. At the time of the outbreak, the factory was making masks for export to the US.

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Guatemala’s white flags indicate pandemic’s deadly side-effect: hunger

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The coronavirus lockdown has brought the country’s informal economy grinding to a halt with desperate results

América Reyes sits on the steps of Guatemala’s National Cathedral, with her four-year-old son at her side and white flag in her hand.

It is a symbol not of surrender, but of gnawing hunger amid the strict coronavirus lockdown which has brought the country’s informal economy to a grinding halt.

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