Aura Lolita Ch\u00e1vez Ixcaquic, 47 years old, is a Maya K\u2019ich\u00e9 community leader, feminist, and defender of Mother Earth. She has lived in exile in Spain since 2017. She left Guatemala after surviving a sixth assassination attempt for her activism as a rights defender and community leader. In the last attempt on her life, a group of armed men shot at a vehicle she was traveling in. The men were linked to the Guatemalan logging company engaged in the illegal logging that Ch\u00e1vez was protesting.<\/p>\n
Deforestation is a major problem in Guatemala, which loses 180,000 hectares of forest every year. Thirty years ago, 58% of the country\u2019s territory was forested. By 2010, only 34% was forested. Ch\u00e1vez is from the western province of K\u2019ich\u00e9 (spelled Quich\u00e9<\/em> on maps, it means forest<\/em> in the eponymous Maya K\u2019ich\u00e9 language) which is majority Native American and was hard-hit by the genocide of the 1980s. Forests in this province are threatened not only by illegal logging, but also by government reforestation programs that plant monocultures of fast-growing pine trees to be harvested for lumber.<\/p>\n Guatemala is one of the ten countries that together are home to over 70% of the planet\u2019s remaining biodiversity. Lolita and her allies fight to preserve this biodiversity against government agencies like the National Forestry Institute (INAB), which receives international funds and promotes a reforestation model based on profit, not conservation.<\/p>\n Company owners and INAB officials have promoted campaigns to defame and delegitimize Native American communities and their right to defend their forests and territories. Quich\u00e9 and its wealth of natural resources has long been a source of conflict. Today\u2019s criminal networks employ strategies of repression that were used against Ixil and K\u2019ich\u00e9 communities during Guatemala\u2019s 36-year armed conflict to profit from logging, mines, dams, and other \u201cmegaprojects.\u201d Paramilitary criminal networks work with corrupt government officials and company representatives who, with the complicity of their international partners, use government resources to criminalize Native American communities that oppose their economic agenda based on exploitation, displacement, and accumulation.<\/p>\n In 2018 alone, 26 human rights defenders like Lolita Ch\u00e1vez were murdered in Guatemala. Ch\u00e1vez was able to leave Guatemala thanks to an international protection program. Her six months in exile have stretched to two years because the Guatemalan government still cannot guarantee her safety. Those who tried to kill her remain free and therefore remain a threat to her life and the lives of her children and the rest of her family.<\/p>\n They have made other worlds believe that our [indigenous] nations are ignorant. But the ancestral wisdom that we have in our communities is so deep that I believe it\u2019s the opposite, that those other nations are the ones incapable of understanding our wisdom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What is the conflict in your community?<\/strong><\/p>\n It started when we founded the K\u2019ich\u00e9 Communities Council (Consejo de Pueblos K\u2019ich\u00e9<\/em> – CPK) that represents over 87 communities. We organized a democratic and peaceful movement to defend life and shared resources. After the war that we suffered for 36 years, the neoliberal economic model arrived with transnational corporations with free trade agreements to occupy our territory. We were already fighting in a women\u2019s movement to defend our rights and to fight for justice for everything that happened to us during the war, but then this neoliberal attack came, and we have to face it in an organized way.<\/p>\n The Guatemalan government has granted dozens of mining permits in the province of Quich\u00e9 without consulting the communities. We began an independent process of self-determination with community referendums in 2010, and in that year the capital of Quich\u00e9 passed a resolution declaring transnational corporations non grata. That\u2019s how we stopped more than 32 mining concessions. After these victories came the attacks. They began to threaten those of us in leadership positions. They killed two of my colleagues, and they disappeared another. When we finally found the one they disappeared, we found him dead, tortured and dismembered. Then the electrical infrastructure companies arrived, Trecsa, Deorsa, and Uni\u00f3n Fenosa [now Energuate, owned by I Squared Capital, a private equity firm based in New York City], and again we set out our position: We won\u2019t let them enter. We continued and the threats began again. That\u2019s when they started to target me.<\/p>\n