Inside a cinderblock structure at the center of Santa Elena Rio Salinas, a small farming village of Indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’ Guatemalans on the border of Mexico, eight men have gathered to tell their stories. It’s late February, and the weather is warm and welcoming. But the meeting must be held indoors for the men’s safety — as they are under constant surveillance by Industria Chiquibul, a Guatemalan palm oil company that today owns vast swaths of land nearly surrounding the village. Some of the men have arrest warrants.
Their crime? Daring to speak out against the human rights abuses of the palm oil giant — ranging from unregulated pollution of local water sources to work conditions described by former employees as “modern slavery.”
Sitting alongside these men are staff members of CONGCOOP — an AJWS grantee organization devoted to protecting the land, resources and human rights of Indigenous Peoples across the country. CONGCOOP was founded three decades ago during the final days of Guatemala’s 36-year internal armed conflict — as thousands of displaced families returned to their territories after living as refugees in Mexico or in hiding in Guatemala’s rugged mountains. More than 200,000 Indigenous and rural Guatemalans were killed during the conflict, overwhelmingly at the hands of the country’s military — which sought to maintain the exploitive, classist and racist system that kept Indigenous Peoples on the fringes of society for generations. In the early 1980’s, the conflict exploded into a brutal genocide.
In the decades since peace accords were signed in 1996, its promises — including increased resources for Indigenous communities, and reparations paid to survivors — have not materialized. Ties between Guatemala’s richest, land-owning families, government officials and former military leaders remain strong — forming a triangle of power that pointedly excludes the country’s Indigenous Peoples.
“The war with weapons ended, but the economic war continues. The oppression has never really stopped,” says Nicholas Pop Che, a former Chiquibul employee who grew up in Santa Elena. “We imagine our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren living in true peace, in true freedom, in true prosperity. And we are begging: Let this war finally end once and for all.”
Nicholas and his compatriots paint a clear picture of this economic war. Beginning in 2005, municipal and district-level politicians began buying small plots of land from local farmers in communities along the Chixoy River, which forms the Guatemala/Mexico border, creating a patchwork quilt of connected plots stretching for miles. Some villagers needed the quick cash; some sold their land under duress. In 2012, these land titles were all signed over to Chiquibul — which immediately began planting African palms to produce palm oil. They hired hundreds of local Guatemalans, promising fair wages and opportunity.
Prosperity never came. Without enforced environmental regulation, Chiquibul began dumping industrial waste into local water sources; by 2017, fish were dying en masse, and villagers reported getting boils when bathing in the river. And without enforced labor protections, villagers who spoke out against inhumane work conditions were intimidated, threatened with violence — or ‘criminalized’, with Chiquibul accusing them of fabricated crimes, and police making arrests without any investigation.
This process of criminalization is extremely common — and can be the easiest way for environmentally-damaging industries to silence people for speaking out against injustice. Today, Guatemala is the third largest exporter of palm oil in the world, and reports are widespread of companies abusing workers, dispossessing community land, polluting water sources and intimidating, or even killing, those who speak out.
“We were a community of subsistence farmers — growing just enough to feed our families, but not enough to save money,” says Augusto Caal Pop. “The prospect of moving forward economically was appealing, of course. We thought: we’ll be paid with dignity, and treated like humans.”
Like most of these men, Augusto took a job with Chiquibul around 2012. His first paycheck shocked him — he was paid only 25 quetzals ($3.25) a day to work 12-hour shifts of hard labor in the fields. In 2020, Augusto helped organize a worker’s strike at the entrance of the plantation. Chiquibul responded by hiring dozens of private, armed security guards who shot at the crowd. Police stood watch as the Indigenous villagers were brutalized.
Within weeks, local police announced that they were charging strike organizers with illegal assembly and trespassing; anyone who restrained the armed guards was charged with kidnapping. Augusto was forced into exile; today, he lives in hiding in Mexico, while his family remains under surveillance and constant intimidation.
Throughout the ordeal, CONGCOOP has accompanied these men, and hundreds of others in similar struggles, to police stations, paying their bail when necessary, and connecting them to free legal aid from another AJWS grantee, Bufete Para Pueblos Indigenas (the Indigenous Law Firm). CONGCOOP staff advocate at a national level for the government to enforce existing labor laws and environmental regulations that would limit the unchecked power of companies like Chiquibul.
As each man tells his harrowing tale of exploitation and abuse, they acknowledge that these corporations have more power, funding and influence than their communities. But they remain unphased. Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala, they say, have been living on this land for generations — and they will outlast the short-term reign of businessmen with no respect for Mother Earth.
“When God put the first man on earth, it wasn’t so he would destroy the magnificence of the land and poison the water. We are here to care for the mountains, the land, the trees and the water. We are here to survive from what we grow — not to surrender our land to palm oil plantations,” says Matias Pop. “We don’t have palm oil running through our veins. You can’t drink a bottle of palm oil, or chop down a palm branch when we’re starving. But businessmen don’t see that — they simply see the riches of this land, and the money they can make from exploiting them.”
