City and Rural Workers Fight Against Racist Oppression
Denouncing the mining companies in 2015
On September 5, a Guatemalan army patrol attempted to enter a Mayan Q’eqchi village on the pretext of searching for a drug-trafficking plane. The villagers confronted the soldiers. In the struggle, three soldiers died. Two more were wounded. The rest fled. Two indigenous people were also injured.
In response, the Guatemalan government imposed a state of siege (suspension of the right to travel, demonstrate, assemble and carry weapons), in 22 municipalities in the northwest of the country. It accused the rural workers of collaborating with the drug traffickers.
The Q’eqchi Indians have a tradition of resistance dating back to the Spanish conquest. And it is not the first time these clashes have occurred since the signing of peace between the guerrillas and the government. Nor is it the first time that a State of Siege has been decreed in Guatemala. This happens every time city workers and rural workers organize to fight against the capitalism that threatens their ecosystem of life.
In the last ten years, the exploitation of mineral resources by CGN Pronico, a subsidiary of the Russian transnational corporation Solway Investment Gro, has caused severe environmental damage to Lake Izabal. The destruction of mountains for the cultivation of the African palm, by the company Naturaceites, has also caused more poverty for the inhabitants of the region.
For the capitalists this ecological destruction has produced huge profits without caring about the lives of the Mayan farmworkers displaced by the war of the 80’s, who live in conditions of misery.
Without schools, clinics, streets and roads, they are themselves, without the help of the government, building their villages by living off fishing and agriculture. And it is they who have also opposed the destruction of their means of livelihood.
We Need Communism.
It is time to change this system of racist exploitation. Now we have the opportunity to fight directly for a communist System.
In communism we will not have to migrate to look for arable land. The Earth’s natural resources will be respected and used for our own interests without polluting our towns, lakes or rivers.
In 2017, Mayan communities began a series of protests over the contamination of Lake Izabal. They ended with a farmworker leader killed by police protecting the walled citadel where the company’s middle management lives. On that occasion, Mayan farmworkers also blocked access to the city, preventing company trucks from leaving the city.
Urban and rural workers in Guatemala are accustomed to fighting against exploitation, despite racist oppression. The resistance of the Guatemalan working class was shown during thirty years of armed struggle. The Mayan, Garifuna and Xinca Indians were the mainstay of the guerrilla groups.
The threat of the bosses is again making itself felt on the indigenous peoples as in the 1980’s, but the response now may be different.
During the war the guerrilla groups led the workers into a struggle for National Liberation, which would supposedly later lead to Socialism. But history showed that all this was a failure. Millions of lives throughout the world were lost to a lost cause, and Guatemala was no exception. Guerrilla leaders sold out the struggle of the indigenous city and rural workers who gave up everything for a change that never happened.
With the recent developments, the opinion of the Mayan Indians is divided. Some think that the army has changed and others that the scorched earth massacres of the 1980’s will be repeated. The truth is that the army as an institution is still the same. It still represents and defends the interests of the bosses. This oligarchy has governed the country since the conquest.
But we must not forget that many of these soldiers are forcibly recruited from their populations under penalty of imprisonment. These recruits can also be won to the revolution. They are also children of the working class.
Let’s organize in Guatemala and around the world for a communist revolution, as the workers are doing in South Africa, El Salvador, Mexico, Puerto Rico, India, and many countries where Red Flag has arrived and where capitalism is still massacring the working class. Let’s organize through the International Communist Workers Party (ICWP). Only Communism will free the working class from capitalist terror.
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