MS partners threatened in Guatemala

Unknown persons try to intimidate and silence MS partner CEIBA

By Eva Rasmussen

26. July 2005

Mario Godínez, member of the MS Policy Advisory Board (PAB) and general co-ordinator of the Association for Community Promotion and Development (CEIBA, by its initials in Spanish) is one of the many Guatemalan activists that have been receiving anonymous threats lately.Very early on the morning of July 7 the CEIBA office fax in Chimaltenango, province of Huehuetenango, received the following message:

URGENT NOTICE
Mario Godínez:
We hereby inform you that the destabilising activities undertaken by your organisation in recent days have caused discontent and indignation among those who work for peace in the province. 
We recommend that you cease and desist from holding meetings of more than twenty persons anywhere, as your failure to do so will be interpreted as a renewed provocation and we will react in response to your destabilising activities. 
We further recommend that from hereon in you exercise great caution in the activities you may have planned in the communities and province. 
Sincerely,
ACTION GROUP FOR PEACE, Huehuetenango 

Delicate issues 

Mario Godínez has been the target of such threats because in past months CEIBA has strengthened its work against the mining concessions that affect nineteen communities in Huehuetenango and is also very active in the struggle against the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, the Dominican Republic and the other Central American countries (DR-CAFTA). The letter printed above is not the first of its kind. 

When DR-CAFTA was ratified by the Guatemalan Congress it led to massive demonstrations in which one person was killed and several wounded. At about that time unknown armed persons showed up at the CEIBA office asking to see either of the top two persons in the organisation. That day Mario Godínez was out of the country.

MS Central America, together with other international NGOs, support CEIBA and a number of Guatemalan organisations which since early March have been targets of intimidatory tactics on the part of anonymous groups. Among other actions, the NGOs have disseminated information regarding human rights abuses and have worked to raise the profile of their organisations.