Rights Action – with tax-charitable legal status in the US and Canada - has worked in Guatemala (and Honduras) for over 25 years. Since 1995, Rights Action has been funding and supporting community-led land, human rights, and environmental defense struggles, and work and struggle for truth and justice. Over the years Rights Action has built trusting relations with human rights, environment, and land defender experts with whom we continually discuss the underlying issues.
A majority of projects Rights Action supports are community-led defense struggles led by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who are courageously resisting illegal, corrupt, and oftentimes violent efforts to dispossess people and communities of their lands for the purpose of large-scale economic interests.
These large-scaled economic interests are owned and operated principally by transnational companies, investors and banks, often in partnership with the Guatemalan economic, political, and military elites. These economic interests are primarily in the sectors of: mining, hydro-electric dams, tourism, and the production (on Guatemala’s richest lands) of for-export consumer goods (bananas, pineapples, African palm, sugar-cane, etc).
This local-to-global economic model is fully supported and backed by the governments of Guatemala, the US and Canada, as well as the World Bank, IMF and Inter-American Development Bank. The people and communities that Rights Action funds and works with are taking on the vested interests of all of these national and international actors and governments.
Rights Action also supports a number of more traditional community development projects – education scholarships and schools, potable water and irrigation projects, etc.
In times of emergencies, Rights Action also provides relief funds to victims of climate heating emergencies, pandemics and human rights violations and political repression.