Human Rights Defenders attacked in Guatemala, 1999 to 2002

While attacks on human rights defenders have occurred throughout the civil war and since its end, there are noticeable periods of increase and subsidence. Numerous reports received indicate a recent increase in such attacks. The following examples illustrate attacks on defenders in recent years, but do not constitute a comprehensive list of those targeted in the period.

• Three members of the FDNG political party, involved in land rights promotion and other activities, disappeared or were killed in 1999.
  
• Religious leaders have been killed, including Mayan priest Raul Coc Choc, in 1999, after receiving death threats, and Sister Barbara Ann Ford, a nun from New York who was working with indigenous people in El Quiché, in 2001.
  
• Universidad de San Carlos (USAC) professor Mayra Gutiérrez disappeared in April 2000, possibly due to her research into Guatemala’s illegal adoption racket, and Maura Ofelia Paniagua Corzantes, a professor and lawyer at the USAC law clinic, was also killed in 2000.
  
• Two members of the environmental group National Council for Protected Areas (CONAP) were killed in 2000; other forestry workers have also been attacked.
  
• In the past year, forensic scientists working to exhume bodies of those killed during the early 1980s have been threatened, along with others investigating massacres committed during the civil war.
  
• Guillermo Ovalle de León, an administrative worker with the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation, was shot and killed in April 2002. The organization was assisting survivors in the trial of the 1995 Xamán massacre, which had begun the day before Ovalle’s death, and had a suit pending in Spain against former
  Guatemalan officials for genocide and crimes against humanity.
  
• In June of this year, subsequent to a visit to Guatemala by the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Human Rights Defenders, Hina Jilani, death threats were sent to eleven representatives of local human rights organizations with whom she had met. In July, five organizations had their offices broken into and ransacked in the middle of the night.
  
• Manuel García de la Cruz was brutally murdered and decapitated in September 2002. He was a human rights and development activist with CONAVIGUA and had participated in mass grave exhumations.

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