{"id":169505,"date":"2020-09-28T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2020-09-28T11:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=169505"},"modified":"2025-01-10T15:07:01","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T15:07:01","slug":"evicting-lote-ocho-how-a-canadian-mining-company-infiltrated-the-guatemalan-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/09\/evicting-lote-ocho-how-a-canadian-mining-company-infiltrated-the-guatemalan-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Evicting Lote Ocho: How a Canadian Mining Company Infiltrated the Guatemalan State"},"content":{"rendered":"
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YouTube<\/p><\/div>\n

26 Sep 2020 – <\/em>I<\/span>t was often when Rosa Elbira Coc Ich was cooking lunch in the communal outdoor kitchen of Lote Ocho, a village in Guatemala, that the helicopters would fly overhead, the gusts of air from their deafening rotor blades scattering her tomatoes, beans, herbs, and tortillas over the reddish-brown soil. The helicopters would hover just above the village huts, billowing up clouds of dust and dirt and blowing some of the iron sheets and palm-leaf thatching that served as roofs onto the ground.<\/p>\n

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Ich remembers these helicopter flyovers taking place daily, sometimes even twice daily, beginning around the end of 2006 and continuing until 2008. Ich, who is now 35, told The Intercept that she would run into her hut, terrified that she and the other villagers were about to be forcibly expelled from their land by Compa\u00f1\u00eda Guatemalteca de Niquel, or CGN: a Guatemalan mining company with which Lote Ocho and at least 18 other Indigenous communities had been embroiled in a dispute over land since early 2005. The helicopters also reminded her of the military helicopters that she saw as a little girl toward the end of the 36-year civil war in Guatemala, during which the military committed genocide against several Indigenous groups.<\/p>\n

Making Ich recall her country\u2019s genocidal past and fear the use of force in the future seems to have been the point.<\/p>\n

At the time, CGN was\u00a0a subsidiary of\u00a0Skye Resources, a Vancouver-based mining company. On October 12, 2006, Skye\u2019s vice president of operations, William Enrico, sent several colleagues an email suggesting ways to deal with the \u201cinvaders,\u201d as they called the Indigenous villagers:<\/p>\n

\u201cCesar advised me to have more flignts [sic] \u2013 especially helicopter. It may be good if our regular flights did some circling over the important areas for psychological impact. This shouldn\u2019t cost us anything extra.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Exhibit-U-p.-125-pressure-the-people-via-helicopters\"<\/p>\n

In another email entered into the court record, Skye\u2019s vice president of operations, William Enrico, outlined the company\u2019s plans to force Indigenous villagers from the land. <\/strong>Document: Affidavit of Amanda Montgomery<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The man who gave Enrico this advice was C\u00e9sar Montes, co-founder of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, once a formidable left-wing militant group whose stronghold encompassed the Ixil region where, between 1981 and 1983, the military committed genocide against the Ixil people. Ixil refugees fleeing to the mountains were strafed by gunmen in helicopters. Montes, who seems to have worked informally as a consultant for Skye and CGN, would have had a keen understanding of the \u201cpsychological impact\u201d that helicopters flyovers would have on Indigenous villagers.<\/p>\n

The flyovers above Lote Ocho were revealed in previously private corporate documents that have become public through a lawsuit in Canada. These documents, largely unreported on until now, show that the harassment by helicopter was just one part of a much larger campaign that Skye and CGN undertook to expel Indigenous communities from a huge swath of land that the companies never had any legal right to either explore or exploit. The effort relied on mostly successful attempts to influence, manipulate, or pay the most powerful institutions of the Guatemalan state, including the judiciary, the security forces \u2014 and even the presidency. The campaign culminated in two waves of evictions targeting several Indigenous villages on January 8, 9, and 17, 2007. Eleven women from Lote Ocho were allegedly gang-raped by police officers, soldiers, and CGN\u2019s security during the last eviction. Ich is one of those women.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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She and the others are now suing Hudbay Minerals Inc., a Toronto-based mining company that bought Skye in 2008, acquiring Skye\u2019s legal liability. During the ongoing lawsuit, the women\u2019s lawyers obtained the emails, photos, and other documents cited in this story through the discovery process and filed them in court as exhibits in an affidavit<\/a>. Hudbay has not yet\u00a0formally responded to the affidavit,\u00a0and the company declined to comment to The Intercept because the \u201cmatter in question is currently before the courts.\u201d CGN did not respond to multiple requests for comment and written questions.\u00a0None of the CGN or Skye employees or their Guatemalan associates that The Intercept attempted to reach for this piece replied or commented. In previous court filings and public-relations materials, Hudbay has disputed the 11 women\u2019s claims, arguing that prosecutor and police records show that no CGN or other private security guards were present at the eviction on January 17 \u2014 and in fact, that \u201cno illegal occupiers were present.\u201d In other words, none of the women were even there, Hudbay claims.<\/p>\n

The 11 women\u2019s accounts of the trauma<\/a> that the alleged gang-rapes caused them are unfathomable. Five were pregnant at the time; four miscarried, and one, three days from her due date when she was allegedly gang-raped, said in a deposition that she gave birth to a stillborn that \u201cwas all blue or green.\u201d Marriages were irreparably ruined. The impoverished community eventually split and drifted apart as some members accepted jobs at CGN, even as the company allegedly intimidated and harassed the women to pressure them into dropping their lawsuit. Thirteen years after the evictions, the women claim to live with chronic pain and ongoing emotional suffering. Sometimes, the two merge. During a 2017 deposition, one woman said: \u201cSomething has entered inside me, and it is a fear. It\u2019s a terror, and it is a physical pain that I live with all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Legacy of the Land<\/h3>\n

Before January 17, 2007, Lote Ocho, a village of about 100 homes, was perched high on a mountain, giving the families there a breathtaking, panoramic view of the rolling, green Guatemalan highlands and, \u201cin the distance, the glinting mirror of Lake Izabal,\u201d as photojournalist Roger LeMoyne described it. Lote Ocho was secluded, an approximately 45-minute drive up a treacherously bumpy, unmaintained road from the nearest town, Cahaboncito. But the people of Lote Ocho rarely went into town. They lived off the land.<\/p>\n

An intimate, spiritual connection to the land is at the heart of the worldview of Lote Ocho\u2019s villagers, who, as Maya Q\u2019eqchi\u2019, belong to one of the more than 20 Indigenous groups in Guatemala descended from the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. But in 2004, Skye was granted permission to begin work in a large area in northeastern Guatemala that was home to many Maya Q\u2019eqchi\u2019 communities, including Lote Ocho.<\/p>\n

Earlier that year, Skye had bought the rights to the open-pit Fenix nickel mine, located near the majority-Maya town of El Estor, on the shore of Lake Izabal, from the Canadian mining company INCO. Skye had also bought INCO\u2019s 70 percent share of its subsidiary, EXMIBAL, which Skye then renamed CGN. But the deal also saw Skye acquire the long-festering, unresolved disputes over land left by INCO and EXMIBAL\u2019s violent past.<\/p>\n

INCO began negotiations over a potential open-pit nickel mine with the military dictatorship of Guatemala in 1960, the year that civil war broke out. After an INCO-hired engineer contributed to the drafting of a new mining code permitting \u201copen sky mining,\u201d forbidden by Guatemala\u2019s then-suspended constitution, EXMIBAL was granted a 40-year mining license for an area covering 385 square kilometers in 1965. The next year, Col. Carlos Arana Osorio launched an ostensible counterinsurgency campaign in the area, which would earn him the nom de guerre\u00a0\u201cthe butcher of Zacapa.\u201d During this campaign, the military expelled peasants from land that would become the site of EXMIBAL\u2019s facilities. Between 3,000 and 8,000 people, mainly noncombatant Maya Q\u2019eqchi\u2019 peasants, were killed. In the \u201970s and \u201980s, EXMIBAL vehicles were used for drive-by shootings targeting local civilians; at least one of them involved the police. In 1978, EXMIBAL employees and soldiers executed four people in the town of Panz\u00f3s where, one month earlier, the military massacred Maya Q\u2019eqchi\u2019 peasants who were protesting over land claims. The full extent of EXMIBAL\u2019s violence will likely never be known: \u201cI, personally, know of even more cases that are not documented and are guarded under the seal of the confessional,\u201d Daniel Vogt, a priest and then-director of a Maya Q\u2019eqchi\u2019 rights organization, told Skye\u2019s COO in September 2006, in an email that came to light in the Canadian lawsuit. \u201cWhat has remained is a history of pain and desperation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It was against this historical backdrop that Skye and the rechristened EXMIBAL, CGN, acquired a license to explore an area of 259 square kilometers that encompassed at least 19 Maya Q\u2019eqchi\u2019 settlements on December 13, 2004. The Canadian embassy in Guatemala had lent Skye a helping hand: \u201cAfter months of negotiation, during which the Embassy played a strong supportive role, the Guatemalan Ministry of Energy and Mines has issued a 3 year exploration licence to Skye Resources,\u201d a counselor from the Canadian embassy wrote to his colleagues on December 16, 2004, in a previously unreported email obtained by the women\u2019s lawyers. \u201cAny victory for responsible mining interests is a victory for Canadian investors.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Guatemala\u2019s Constitutional Court would later rule that the license was granted illegally. The Guatemalan government did not consult the Indigenous people occupying or using the lands before granting the license, which it was required to do under the U.N.\u2019s International Labour Organization Convention 169, or the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, to which Guatemala has been a signatory since the 1996 Peace Accords. The ILO found the license contravened Convention 169 in 2007, and the Constitutional Court came to the same conclusion on June 18, 2020.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhat has remained is a history of pain and desperation.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Given this history, it was virtually inevitable that the exploration drilling in early 2005 would spark many conflicts between the companies and local communities, who alleged that CGN was encroaching on their land and destroying the environment, including by polluting their water supplies. Nevertheless, on April 17, 2006, Guatemala granted Skye and CGN another license \u2014 also later found to be invalid by the Constitutional Court \u2014 which allowed them to start mining.<\/p>\n

In response to CGN\u2019s increasingly active operations, five Maya Q\u2019eqchi\u2019 groups composed of about 300 families moved onto company-claimed land on September 17, 2006. They argued that they were reclaiming lands that INCO had stolen from them over 40 years ago. Over the next two months, these groups grew to nearly 1,000 families.<\/p>\n

From the time these settlements were founded right up until the evictions in January 2007, which targeted some of these recent settlements but also another decades-old village, many people on both sides of the dispute urged the companies to resolve the standoff through dialogue, according to emails in the court documents.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny attempt to forcibly evict the villagers would end in tragedy,\u201d Vogt, the priest, emailed Skye management on September 22, 2006. Just three days before the evictions, CGN\u2019s own consultant emailed a company manager: \u201cAs we have already said, there will NEVER be a positive eviction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though Skye management stated that the \u201cinvasions\u201d were not affecting operations, primarily because most of them were \u201cnot on essential project land,\u201d Skye decided that if the villagers would not leave on their own, Skye and CGN would force them off.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Indigenous<\/p>\n

Indigenous villagers had lived in the community of Lote Ocho for decades, but Skye and CGN characterized them as \u201cinvaders.\u201d Photo: James Rodriguez<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cKeep the President Informed\u201d<\/h3>\n

Two men from the town of El Estor were high up on a remote mountain when they say they saw about 50 people force their way onto CGN\u2019s land on September 23, 2006. The village of Lote Ocho was now located on the land where this group had \u201center[ed] by force,\u201d indicating that Lote Ocho was another land occupation. Or at least, that\u2019s what the men allege in affidavits that CGN filed in a Guatemalan court in the fall of 2006.<\/p>\n

Those affidavits\u00a0\u201cfalsely asserted that the affiants had personally witnessed members of the community of Lote Ocho using force to occupy their village when in fact the affiants had never been to Lote Ocho,\u201d lawyers for the 11 women alleged in their own affidavit.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is important because these are the foundational documents that start everything,\u201d said Cory Wanless, who, along with Murray Klippenstein, is representing the women in court. \u201cIt undermines the whole legal foundation of seeking an eviction in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two lawyers\u00a0have\u00a0been litigating this and two other cases against Hudbay (the company that bought Skye) since 2011. The lawsuits have garnered international coverage<\/a> because they could set a precedent in making it easier to hold multinational corporations accountable in their home countries for wrongdoing abroad.<\/p>\n

He argues that the affidavits that initiated the eviction\u00a0proceedings are unreliable for a few reasons. Most importantly, Lote Ocho has been located in the same area for decades; it wasn\u2019t settled on that day in September 2006, although several additional families did join Lote Ocho that month as part of the broader reclamation movement. And if 50 people entered the area \u201cby force,\u201d why were these two men \u2014 who just so happened to be passing by on top of a secluded mountain \u2014 the ones swearing the affidavits instead of a company employee against whom this group would presumably have had to exercise force?<\/p>\n

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The lawsuits could set a precedent, making it easier to hold multinational corporations accountable in their home countries for wrongdoing abroad.<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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While these affidavits appear highly implausible by themselves, they are also virtually identical to two other affidavits that CGN filed, each supposedly listing the names of the occupants of a different village that Skye and CGN wanted to evict. The affidavits recycle the same list of names, with only minor differences. Taken together, they assert that the same individuals simultaneously occupied three different settlements. Wanless thinks CGN filed these affidavits because, in Guatemala\u2019s often dysfunctional courts, \u201cthat\u2019s enough to get the job done.\u201d<\/p>\n

They did, in fact, get the job done, and Wanless may be right about why they worked. There is often a \u201clack of due diligence on the part of the Public Prosecutor\u2019s Office and judicial authorities to investigate [land] disputes; eviction orders are often authorized after a superficial consideration of the facts,\u201d states a 2008 Amnesty International submission to the U.N.<\/p>\n

Many judges \u201cjust take into account the title that the private sector is presenting,\u201d said Ram\u00f3n Cadena, director of the Central American office of the International Commission of Jurists. This also facilitates \u201cpressure by private-sector entities,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Despite the affidavits being accepted, CGN had trouble obtaining the eviction order for Lote Ocho. On December 1, 2006, Enrico, the Skye executive, emailed other senior management at the company an update.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Exhibit-S-p.-117-pressuring-the-judge\"<\/p>\n

An email from Enrico shows that pressure on a local judge was arranged so that CGN could obtain an eviction order. Document: Affidavit of Amanda Montgomery<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe\u2019ll need pressure on the Puerto Barrios Judge,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWe have this arranged.\u201d<\/p>\n

One week later, the judge granted the eviction order, according to the affidavit filed by the women\u2019s lawyers.<\/p>\n

But CGN soon had to clear another legal hurdle: The villagers and an Indigenous rights group, CONIC, had gone to court and requested an amparo<\/em> \u2014 similar to an injunction \u2014 to temporarily prevent the impending evictions because they had not been notified of them. In late December, it seemed likely that they would be granted their request, which would have postponed the evictions for at least six months.<\/p>\n

According to emails filed in court, CGN managers called their \u201ccontacts\u201d at the Polic\u00eda Nacional Civil, Guatemala\u2019s national police, to see if the PNC could conduct the evictions ahead of schedule, before the amparo could be granted. However, the police replied that too many officers were on holiday. Additionally, \u201cthey said the order to speed up the execution of the orders will have to come from a very high level either the President or the Minister of the Interior,\u201d Monz\u00f3n wrote.<\/p>\n

Monz\u00f3n called Rodolfo Sosa, a CGN lawyer, who said he would try to speak to the Guatemalan president, \u00d3scar Berger. Sosa and Berger were once partners in the same prestigious firm, and Sosa\u2019s daughter is married to one of the president\u2019s sons. Sosa could not reach Berger, however. So Monz\u00f3n contacted his \u201cfriend,\u201d the minister of defense, who also couldn\u2019t help because of the vacationing officers.<\/p>\n

Since those avenues were dead ends, CGN requested that the court let it weigh in during the legal proceedings that CONIC had initiated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Emails<\/p>\n

Emails show CGN planning a \u201cslowing strategy\u201d in court and trying to leverage political connections ahead of the evictions. Document: Affidavit of Amanda Montgomery<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe hope that with this actions [sic] we will be able to delay CONIC process for at least 2 weeks, which means the eviction orders will be executed within that period of time,\u201d Monz\u00f3n wrote. Enrico replied that it was important to keep Rodolfo Sosa informed of the \u201cslowing strategy,\u201d since \u201cRodolfo is our avenue to keep the President informed.\u201d<\/p>\n

This \u201cslowing strategy\u201d worked: The evictions took place before the amparo could be granted.<\/p>\n

The emails show that Skye and CGN had woven themselves into a network of informal connections that they drew on while attempting to influence government officials. This illustrates how \u201ccollusion between business and the state\u201d works in Guatemala,\u00a0University of Oslo professor Mariel Aguilar-St\u00f8en told The Intercept. Aguilar-St\u00f8en co-authored a 2016 article<\/a> that examined how local elites often participate in mining projects by, for example, working as company managers or lawyers, allowing the companies to exploit \u201cthe networks of contacts that the domestic elites control,\u201d the article states. The way CGN leveraged its connections \u201cis a very good example of how mining companies in particular operate and how they gain access to resources,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"CGN<\/p>\n

CGN coordinated with the Guatemalan police and army for violent evictions of villages in the area. <\/strong>Photo: James Rodriguez<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Black, Blue, and Green<\/h3>\n

CGN already had a preview of just how violent evictions could be. On the morning of November 12, 2006, a public prosecutor and about 60 police officers showed up at a Maya Q\u2019eqchi\u2019 settlement of approximately 30 families that was located across the road from CGN\u2019s housing complex, on the outskirts of El Estor. The families had settled there early the previous morning, when it had been the scene of clashes with the PNC and CGN employees. An uneasy peace had reigned since later that morning, when government officials charged with resolving land disputes were said to have struck a tentative agreement with some leaders of the Maya Q\u2019eqchi\u2019 settlements that were established in September. But with the arrival of the prosecutor and the police, the situation soon spiraled out of control.<\/p>\n

During the standoff that ensued, it became clear that the prosecutor did not have a judicial eviction order, which he argued was not necessary \u2014 but he was incorrect, according to a contemporary Amnesty International report<\/a> that explains the legal process for conducting evictions in Guatemala. The priest Daniel Vogt and a partner apparently defused the tension enough that by midday, the families left with their supplies, but a clash erupted between the police and locals not long afterward, and later that day, the police fired tear gas into another settlement by CGN\u2019s airstrip to evict its inhabitants. Then the police shot tear gas, without warning, into another settlement to evict some 200 families, according to a contemporary report by Vogt\u2019s Maya Q\u2019eqchi\u2019 rights organization. During these skirmishes, goods were stolen and several people were injured, including a pregnant woman who had been engulfed in tear gas, the report states. Two people disappeared. The next afternoon, one of the missing people was found lying unconscious and badly beaten beside a trail. There were more skirmishes with the police that day.<\/p>\n

About 20 people broke into CGN\u2019s community relations center and a newly renovated but still-empty hospital and set the buildings on fire. Internal company correspondence reveals that this group was likely what company management called a \u201cyouth mob\u201d that was \u201cnot related to the invaders.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLater on at night everything went back to normal-a military group was deployed to EE [El Estor] to safeguard our personnel,\u201d reads a company email.<\/p>\n

In response, a community relations consultant sent an email stating, \u201cHaving the military deployed as peacekeepers opens an area of risk for us \u2013 we need to make sure we create a clear distinction between company security forces and the military.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Documents strongly suggest that the public security forces were paid large sums of money for their work in the evictions.<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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But that distinction was already very blurred, as is clear from an email sent on November 17, 2006, just days after the military\u2019s deployment and the heavy-handed, unlawful evictions. CGN\u2019s financial manager wrote to Skye\u2019s chief financial officer: \u201cWe have paid to keep the invaders under control this week Q125,000,\u201d which was approximately $16,447.37 at the time.<\/p>\n

The money had covered the hotel rooms, meals, and gasoline of 125 PNC officers. CGN had also paid for the meals of about 65 soldiers who were sleeping in CGN\u2019s cafeteria for security reasons.<\/p>\n

The money for the police was transferred \u201cto personal account [sic] who is working to coordinate these tasks,\u201d wrote CGN\u2019s financial manager.<\/p>\n

The \u201cpersonal account\u201d likely belonged to one of at least several middlemen whom Skye and CGN had retained to take advantage of their connections to the PNC and military,\u00a0according to the affidavit\u00a0submitted by\u00a0women\u2019s lawyers.\u00a0One middleman was a friend of the second-in-command of the PNC, and another was a disgraced colonel involved in a \u201cpowerful mafia ring in the army and police\u201d in the 1990s, according to Latin American Digital Beat<\/a>. From October 2006 until at least up through the evictions in January, the companies spent close to $140,000, and likely far more, in clandestine payments to these middlemen, who passed on nearly all of it to the security forces, according to numerous emails, bonus sheets, and spreadsheets entered into the court record.<\/p>\n

While a lot of money went towards paying for logistical supplies, such as gasoline and lodging, certain documents strongly suggest that the public security forces were paid large sums of money for their work in the evictions themselves.<\/p>\n

For example, a security and human rights audit that Skye requested states, \u201cThere are rumors of 1.2 million quetzals\u201d \u2014 about $157,895 at the time \u2014 \u201cfunneled to the armed forces for their work in land evictions, when all that was officially agreed to was logistical support such as gasoline.\u201d These rumors were pretty persuasive: \u201cBased on the rumors of misused funds, the company fired the actors that instigated this type of activity,\u201d the audit notes.<\/p>\n

One spreadsheet shows \u201cthe total funding in cash\u201d as of December 31, 2006, \u201cfor evictions.\u201d It records payments for vaguely worded services like \u201cfunds invasions security.\u201d<\/p>\n

Legal experts have raised the possibility that just the payments for the logistical supplies violated Guatemalan and Canadian anti-corruption laws. Paying for the supplies of the public security forces amounts to bribing them, since Skye and CGN effectively bought a degree of influence over them, argued Guatemalan lawyer Verenice Jerez, who worked with CICIG, a now-disbanded United Nations-backed anti-corruption commission<\/a>. \u201cIn this world, nothing is free,\u201d she said. Alan Franklin, a Canadian corruption law expert who sometimes works with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, echoed what Jerez said. But Jennifer Quaid, another Canadian expert, said that it was unclear whether the payments ran afoul of the version of the relevant Canadian law that was in force at the time. No charges have been laid against either company for making them. Hudbay and CGN did not respond to written questions from The Intercept about the payments.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Regardless of whether any laws were broken, the companies were heavily involved in the planning and execution of the operations of the public security forces. This close working relationship extended up to the highest-ranking officers. In December 2006, CGN\u2019s site manager \u201ccoordinated\u201d with Rodolfo Sisniega-Otero, the son of a notorious general and a commander of the Brigada Guardia de Honor, an elite corps of military police. And one day before the alleged gang-rapes, one of CGN\u2019s middlemen and Edin Palma, a PNC chief, went on a reconnaissance flyover of the \u201cinvaded areas.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Exhibit-FFF-part-2\"<\/p>\n

A photo introduced in court shows Guatemalan police trucks lining up outside a CGN compound. <\/strong>Photo: Affidavit of Amanda Montgomery<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Skye and CGN management also participated in coordinating the on-the-ground activities of the rank-and-file police officers and soldiers who effectively worked as partners of CGN\u2019s security. Photos show that shortly before the eviction on January 9, dozens of PNC trucks and vans stretched in a long row along the road outside of CGN\u2019s compound, inside of which a white pickup truck carried men \u201cin what appear to be army uniforms,\u201d according to\u00a0the affidavit filed by the 11 women\u2019s lawyers. The public and private security forces gathered at CGN\u2019s facilities \u201con the morning of each eviction, including the eviction on January 17,\u201d\u00a0the affadavit alleges. Photos also show CGN managers, their middlemen, and PNC officers having a meeting after the eviction of January 8, 2007. This was just one of the \u201cpre-eviction planning sessions and post-eviction debriefs [that] were held in CGN\u2019s offices,\u201d the affidavit claims.<\/p>\n

The armed, masked men who stormed into Lote Ocho as the rain poured and the wind gusted at 5 o\u2019clock in the evening on January 17, 2007, only seemed to be distinguished by their uniforms. The uniforms were black, \u201cthe colour of the sky,\u201d and \u201cthe colour of the trees,\u201d the women say. Black, blue, and green: the outfits of the PNC, CGN security, and the army. Something else helped tell them apart: Two of the women who are literate say they saw CGN\u2019s logo on the blue uniforms.<\/p>\n

This distinction mattered little, however, since the three groups of men had allegedly already broken into smaller groups and teamed up when they attacked, according to the women\u2019s depositions. Men from each force seized one pregnant woman who was making tortillas and dragged her into the bushes as her children cried and screamed, she testified. She described the men as a \u201cdog when he comes and he finds some food and he\u2019s growling.\u201d It was all together that they gagged her, wrapped cloth around her eyes and ears, cut her clothes off with a machete, and raped her one after another in what was perhaps an intentional reenactment of the rapes that the military used as a tactic of terror against Maya women during the civil war. \u201cThey took off my clothing and they played with my life,\u201d another woman said during her deposition. Men from all three groups splashed gasoline over the makeshift huts and the women\u2019s tattered clothing and set them ablaze.<\/p>\n

Irma Cac, one of the woman who was allegedly gang-raped, cried while speaking in Toronto in September 2019 after attending a hearing in the ongoing lawsuit. \u201cI will never forget,\u201d she said, \u201cit will never escape from my eyes \u2014 the color of the uniforms of the soldiers, of the police, and of the private security.\u201d<\/p>\n

Update, September 26, 2020, 3:45 p.m.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article has been updated to include that Murray Klippenstein is also representing the 11 women.<\/em><\/p>\n

_____________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Max Binks-Collier – <\/em><\/a>maxwell.binkscollier@\u200bprotonmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

26 Sep 2020 – The 11 women\u2019s accounts of the trauma that the gang-rapes caused them are unfathomable. Five were pregnant at the time; four miscarried, and one, three days from her due date when she was gang-raped, said in a deposition that she gave birth to a stillborn that \u201cwas all blue or green.\u201d The women claim to live with chronic pain and ongoing emotional suffering. \u201cSomething has entered inside me, and it is a fear. It\u2019s a terror, and it is a physical pain that I live with all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":169506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[232,1738,541,599],"class_list":["post-169505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean","tag-capitalism","tag-guatemala","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-oppression"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284906,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169505\/revisions\/284906"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}