Category Archives: Guatemala

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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Children as young as eight used to pick coffee beans for Starbucks

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Nespresso also named in TV exposé of labour scandal in Guatemala

High street coffee shop giant Starbucks has been caught up in a child labour row after an investigation revealed that children under 13 were working on farms in Guatemala that supply the chain with its beans.

Channel 4’s Dispatches filmed the children working 40-hour weeks in gruelling conditions, picking coffee for a daily wage little more than the price of a latte. The beans are also supplied to Nespresso, owned by Nestlé. Last week, actor George Clooney, the advertising face of Nespresso, praised the investigation and said he was saddened by its findings.

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How the American dream died on the world’s busiest border

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It is a place where worlds converge, a vast melting pot of different peoples, all in search of a better life. Yet the US-Mexico border is also, increasingly, a focal point for human suffering

Milson, from Honduras, sits with his 14-year-old daughter, Loany, on the reedy riverbank beside the bridge connecting Matamoros, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, with downtown Brownsville, Texas, across the Rio Grande.

On the far reach – a few yards but another world away – is a vast tent (officially a “soft-sided facility”) erected to cope with the sheer numbers seeking asylum in the US. In a few weeks’ time, on the date stipulated on their “notice to appear” document, the people staying here will have their “credible fear interview” by video link.

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Drought and hunger: why thousands of Guatemalans are fleeing north

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The threat of famine and the battle for dwindling natural resources are increasingly being recognised as major factors in the exodus

Martina García grinds just enough maize kernels to make a handful of tortillas which she serves to her children and grandson for breakfast with a sprinkling of salt.

García, 40, must ration the family’s last few sacks of tiny corncobs after drought and prolonged heatwaves linked to the climate emergency devastated crops across Guatemala.

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Hundreds of Central American migrants rounded up by guardsmen at Mexico border – video

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National guardsmen in riot gear have blocked the path of hundreds of Central Americans near the town of Frontera Hidalgo in southern Mexico. 

Security forces corralled the migrants and hauled them on to buses, as Mexico continues with efforts to contain mass migration under pressure from the Trump administration.


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Central American migrants meet with armed guardsmen at Mexico border

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Mexico continues with efforts to contain the procession under pressure from the Trump administration

National guardsmen in riot gear have corralled hundreds of Central Americans and hauled them on to buses as Mexico continues with efforts to contain mass migration, under pressure from the Trump administration.

Security forces blocked the migrants’ path near the town of Frontera Hidalgo on Thursday afternoon, after hundreds had swept into Mexico across the Suchiate River that divides the country from Guatemala.

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Scuffles erupt between migrants and troops at Guatemala-Mexico border – video report

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Scuffles have broken out between hundreds of Central American migrants and National Guard agents at the border between Guatemala and Mexico. The troops formed a barrier to stop the migrants from entering deeper into Mexico as they attempted to cross into the US

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US agents aid in Guatemalan crackdown on hundreds of migrants headed north

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Move in effect dashes migrants’ plans to travel together in a ‘caravan’ to the United States

Guatemalan police accompanied by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have swept up hundreds of migrants, returning them to the Honduran border and in effect dashing their plans to travel together in a “caravan” to the United States.

Other, smaller groups traveled on in dribs and drabs in a movement involving several thousand people but very different from previous caravans.

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Vivian Suter: the rainforest-dwelling artist who paints with fish glue, dogs and mud

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She was ignored for decades, but now Suter has been rediscovered as a pioneering eco-artist. We meet her, and her 97-year-old collagist mum, in the wilds of Guatemala

A large dog romps across a blue and white canvas, leaving a trail of brown paw prints. “Oh well,” shrugs Vivian Suter. “They’re part of the work now. I don’t think anyone will mind.” I realise Bonzo – one of three Alsatian crossbreeds that shadow the artist wherever she goes in her Guatemalan home – has just put the finishing touches to an artwork that will shortly be on public display thousands of miles away.

The painting lies on the floor of her “laager” – a storage barn open to the elements, apart from a metre-high stone wall, which you have to clamber over with the help of a rickety chair. The wall is to guard against mudslides, she explains, gesturing at a ghostly tideline that rings the interior. Most of her works hang from a rack; the piles on the floor are for three upcoming exhibitions in Berlin, London and Madrid. Having just opened a 53-piece installation at Tate Liverpool, Suter is halfway through choosing the 200 works that will feature in her Camden Arts Centre exhibition, which opens next week.

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