Download or read book Guatemala News Watch written by and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Human Rights in the Americas written by James T. Lawrence and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The existence of human rights helps secure the peace, deter aggression, promote the rule of law, combat crime and corruption, and prevent humanitarian crises. These human rights include freedom from torture, freedom of expression, press freedom, women's rights, children's rights, and the protection of minorities. This book surveys the countries of the Americas and is augmented by a current bibliography and useful indexes by subject, title and author.
Download or read book The Guatemalan Military Project written by Jennifer Schirmer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1999, the Guatemala truth commission issued its report on human rights violations during Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war that ended in 1996. The commission, sponsored by the UN, estimates the conflict resulted in 200,000 deaths and disappearances. The commission holds the Guatemalan military responsible for 93 percent of the deaths. In The Guatemalan Military Project, Jennifer Schirmer documents the military's role in human rights violations through a series of extensive interviews striking in their brutal frankness and unique in their first-hand descriptions of the campaign against Guatemala's citizens. High-ranking officers explain in their own words their thoughts and feelings regarding violence, political opposition, national security doctrine, democracy, human rights, and law. Additional interviews with congressional deputies, Guatemalan lawyers, journalists, social scientists, and a former president give a full and balanced account of the Guatemalan power structure and ruling system. With expert analysis of these interviews in the context of cultural, legal, and human rights considerations, The Guatemalan Military Project provides a successful evaluation of the possibilities and processes of conversion from war to peace in Latin America and around the world.
Download or read book Blood of Extraction written by Todd Gordon and published by Fernwood Publishing. This book was released on 2016-12-07T00:00:00Z with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rooted in thousands of pages of Access to Information documents and dozens of interviews carried out throughout Latin America, Blood of Extraction examines the increasing presence of Canadian mining companies in Latin America and the environmental and human rights abuses that have occurred as a result. By following the money, Gordon and Webber illustrate the myriad ways Canadian-based multinational corporations, backed by the Canadian state, have developed extensive economic interests in Latin America over the last two decades at the expense of Latin American people and the environment. Latin American communities affected by Canadian resource extraction are now organized into hundreds of opposition movements, from Mexico to Argentina, and the authors illustrate the strategies used by the Canadian state to silence this resistance and advance corporate interests.
Download or read book Paradise in Ashes written by Beatriz Manz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-03-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paradise in Ashes is a deeply engaged and moving account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. In this compelling book, Beatriz Manz—an anthropologist who spent over two decades studying the Mayan highlands and remote rain forests of Guatemala—tells the story of the village of Santa María Tzejá, near the border with Mexico. Manz writes eloquently about Guatemala's tortured history and shows how the story of this village—its birth, destruction, and rebirth—embodies the forces and conflicts that define the country today. Drawing on interviews with peasants, community leaders, guerrillas, and paramilitary forces, Manz creates a richly detailed political portrait of Santa María Tzejá, where highland Maya peasants seeking land settled in the 1970s. Manz describes these villagers' plight as their isolated, lush, but deceptive paradise became one of the centers of the war convulsing the entire country. After their village was viciously sacked in 1982, desperate survivors fled into the surrounding rain forest and eventually to Mexico, and some even further, to the United States, while others stayed behind and fell into the military's hands. With great insight and compassion, Manz follows their flight and eventual return to Santa María Tzejá, where they sought to rebuild their village and their lives.
Download or read book Guatemala s Political Puzzle written by Georges A. Fauriol and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1990-09-01 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guatemala is one of the least studied and most volatile nations in Central America. Fauriol and Loser chronicle Guatemala's modern political development as a prelude to an analysis of the nation's current environment. This is not a conventional history, but a social, political, and economic cross-section based on the latest secondary information and research available, supplemented by a firsthand set of observations. The authors proceed from three major premises: (1) the armed forces, far from being the cause of instability, have provided the only real models of governance; (2) far from suffering from a banana republic inferiority complex, the culture has a rich nationalist heritage, bordering on outright chauvinism; and (3) the political experiences of the nation have been adjudicated in the main by the armed forces. The authors note that Guatemala's break with its authoritarian past started in 1985. How this transfer of power has occurred, who the new rulers are, and what new political civilian forces have been set in motion, become the fulcrum for this study. The political experience of Guatemala is taken seriously and reviewed in detail. The role of foreign power is neither ignored nor minimized, but essentially this is a study of national elites. The volume covers areas ranging from human rights abuses by past administrations to current problems forced on the regime by a never-ending battle against terrorism and insurgency. It concludes with a fine bibliographical essay and an excellent set of reference tools for the specialist. In short, whether a person seeks a quick overview, or the scholar aims for precise data and theory, this is the state of the art book on Guatemala for the late 1980s going into the electoral period of the early 1990s.
Download or read book The Maya of Guatemala written by Phillip Wearne and published by Minority Rights Group. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MAYA: A PEOPLE IN RESISTANCE ‘As I go around the world, people seem surprised that we indigenous people of Central America still exist’, noted the Maya Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchú in 1992. More than 500 years after the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, the Maya, descendants of one of the greatest pre-Columbian civilizations, not only exist but are thriving. The survival of 21 different Maya speaking peoples in Guatemala is a living testimony to their powers of resistance. In recent years, the brutal conquest of their cities and mountain lands by Spanish conquistadores in the early sixteenth century, has been replayed in all its horrors. In the 1980s alone, the Guatemalan army is conservatively estimated to have murdered 20,000 Maya. Whole villages were wiped out, as at least 120,000 fled into Mexico and 500,000 became internal refugees. The MAYA OF GUATEMALA studies the Maya world in depth: the history, culture, beliefs and responses to the nonindigenous world. The author, Phillip Wearne, a journalist with long experience in Central America, looks at the Maya cultural resurgence of recent years – the product of both fearsome oppression and international geo-political changes of the 1980s. This is a story of indomitable will, a plea for solidarity and international support for a people who want to reclaim their identity as one of the ‘first peoples’ of the world. It is also a story of resistance and resurgence on behalf of the Maya who in the words of one internal refugee ‘want to come out of the mud, the cold, the shadows and into the sunshine’. Please note that the terminology in the fields of minority rights and indigenous peoples’ rights has changed over time. MRG strives to reflect these changes as well as respect the right to self-identification on the part of minorities and indigenous peoples. At the same time, after over 50 years’ work, we know that our archive is of considerable interest to activists and researchers. Therefore, we make available as much of our back catalogue as possible, while being aware that the language used may not reflect current thinking on these issues.
Download or read book Shattered Hope written by James A Goldston and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-26 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to evaluate the political transformation that has been claimed for Guatemala since 1986 in light of its effects upon workers, considering the future evolution of Guatemala's experiment in controlled democracy.
Download or read book Final Solutions written by Benjamin A. Valentino and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-19 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benjamin A. Valentino finds that ethnic hatreds or discrimination, undemocratic systems of government, and dysfunctions in society play a much smaller role in mass killing and genocide than is commonly assumed. He shows that the impetus for mass killing usually originates from a relatively small group of powerful leaders and is often carried out without the active support of broader society. Mass killing, in his view, is a brutal political or military strategy designed to accomplish leaders' most important objectives, counter threats to their power, and solve their most difficult problems. In order to capture the full scope of mass killing during the twentieth century, Valentino does not limit his analysis to violence directed against ethnic groups, or to the attempt to destroy victim groups as such, as do most previous studies of genocide. Rather, he defines mass killing broadly as the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants, using the criteria of 50,000 or more deaths within five years as a quantitative standard. Final Solutions focuses on three types of mass killing: communist mass killings like the ones carried out in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia; ethnic genocides as in Armenia, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda; and "counter-guerrilla" campaigns including the brutal civil war in Guatemala and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Valentino closes the book by arguing that attempts to prevent mass killing should focus on disarming and removing from power the leaders and small groups responsible for instigating and organizing the killing.
Download or read book U S Ends and Means in Central America written by Ernest Van den Haag and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book United States Policy Toward Guatemala written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs. Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Engaged Observer written by Victoria Sanford and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Anthropology has long been associated with an ethos of "engagement." The field's core methods and practices involve long-term interpersonal contact between researchers and their study participants, giving major research topics in the field a distinctively human face. The fact that these interactions frequently cross social parameters, including class, race, ethnicity, and gender, raises important questions. Can research findings be authentic and objective? Are anthropologists able to use their data to aid the participants of their study, and is that aid always welcome? In this book, authors bring together an international array of scholars who have been embedded in some of the most conflict-ridden and dangerous zones in the world to reflect on the role and responsibility of anthropological inquiry. They explore issues of truth and objectivity, the role of the academic, the politics of memory, and the impact of race, gender, and social position on the research process. Through ethnographic case studies, they offer models for conducting engaged research and illustrate the contradictions and challenges of doing so".--BOOKJACKET.
Download or read book Foreign Operations Export Financing and Related Programs Appropriations for 1990 written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 900 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Victims of International Crimes An Interdisciplinary Discourse written by Thorsten Bonacker and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In international law victims' issues have gained more and more attention over the last decades. In particular in transitional justice processes the victim is being given high priority. It is to be seen in this context that the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court foresees a rather excessive victim participation concept in criminal prosecution. In this volume issue is taken at first with the definition of victims, and secondly with the role of the victim as a witness and as a participant. Several chapters address this matter with a view to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and the Trial against Demjanjuk in Germany. In a third part the interests of the victims outside the criminal trial are being discussed. In the final part the role of civil society actors are being tackled. This volume thus gives an overview of the role of victims in transitional justice processes from an interdisciplinary angle, combining academic research and practical experience.
Download or read book Return Of Guatemala S Refugees written by Clark Taylor and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On February 13, 1982, the Guatemalan army stormed into the remote northern Guatemalan village of Santa Maria Tzeja. The villagers had already fled in terror, but over the next six days seventeen of them, mostly women and children, were caught and massacred, animals were slaughtered, and the entire village was burned to the ground. Twelve years later, utilizing terms of refugee agreements reached in 1982, villagers from Santa Maria who had fled to Mexico returned to their homes and lands to re-create their community with those who had stayed in Guatemala. Return of Guatemala's Refugees tells the story of that process. In this moving and provocative book, Clark Taylor describes the experiences of the survivors -- both those who stayed behind in conditions of savage repression and those who fled to Mexico where they learned to organize and defend their rights. Their struggle to rebuild is set in the wider drama of efforts by grassroots groups to pressure the government, economic elites, and army to fulfill peace accords signed in December of 1996. Focusing on the village of Santa Maria Tzeja, Taylor defines the challenges that faced returning refugees and their community. How did the opposing subcultures of fear (generated among those who stayed in Guatemala) and of education and human rights (experienced by those who took refuge in Mexico) coexist? Would the flood of international money sent to settle the refugees and fulfill the peace accords serve to promote participatory development or new forms of social control? How did survivors expand the space for democracy firmly grounded in human rights? How did they get beyond the grief and trauma that remained from the terror of the early eighties? Finally, the ultimate challenge, how did they work within conditions of extreme poverty to create a grassroots democracy in a militarized society?
Download or read book Moral Victories written by Susan D. Burgerman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1980s, security forces and paramilitary organizations killed, abducted, or tortured an estimated 80,000 Salvadoran citizens. During this period, the government of Guatemala was responsible for the death or disappearance of more than 100,000 civilians, many of them indigenous peasants. But such abuses were curtailed when peace talks, largely motivated by international human rights activism, led to interventions by United Nations observers who raised the degree of respect for human rights within each nation. These two cases are emblematic of many more in recent world events. Susan Burgerman here explains how international pressure can be effective in changing oppressive state behavior. Moral Victories includes a detailed comparative study of human rights abuses in El Salvador and Guatemala from 1980 to 1996, as well as a brief, focused examination of the situation in Cambodia from 1975 to 1992.Moral Victories lays out the mechanisms by which the United Nations and transnational human rights activists have intervened in civil wars and successfully linked international peace and security with the promotion of human rights. The meaning of state sovereignty, defense of which had previously limited governments to unenforceable statements of opprobrium against violator nations, has changed over the past two decades to allow for more aggressive action in support of international moral standards. As a result, human rights have gained increasing importance in the arena of world politics.While researching this book in Guatemala and El Salvador, Burgerman interviewed government officials, negotiators, analysts, and human rights workers, and accompanied UN observer teams in their travels through rainforests and mountainous terrain.
Download or read book The Image before the Weapon written by Helen M. Kinsella and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since at least the Middle Ages, the laws of war have distinguished between combatants and civilians under an injunction now formally known as the principle of distinction. The principle of distinction is invoked in contemporary conflicts as if there were an unmistakable and sure distinction to be made between combatant and civilian. As is so brutally evident in armed conflicts, it is precisely the distinction between civilian and combatant, upon which the protection of civilians is founded, cannot be taken as self-evident or stable. Helen M. Kinsella documents that the history of international humanitarian law itself admits the difficulty of such a distinction. In The Image before the Weapon, Kinsella explores the evolution of the concept of the civilian and how it has been applied in warfare. A series of discourses—including gender, innocence, and civilization—have shaped the legal, military, and historical understandings of the civilian and she documents how these discourses converge at particular junctures to demarcate the difference between civilian and combatant. Engaging with works on the law of war from the earliest thinkers in the Western tradition, including St. Thomas Aquinas and Christine de Pisan, to contemporary figures such as James Turner Johnson and Michael Walzer, Kinsella identifies the foundational ambiguities and inconsistencies in the principle of distinction, as well as the significant role played by Christian concepts of mercy and charity. She then turns to the definition and treatment of civilians in specific armed conflicts: the American Civil War and the U.S.-Indian wars of the nineteenth century, and the civil wars of Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s. Finally, she analyzes the two modern treaties most influential for the principle of distinction: the 1949 IV Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War and the 1977 Protocols Additional to the 1949 Conventions, which for the first time formally defined the civilian within international law. She shows how the experiences of the two world wars, but particularly World War II, and the Algerian war of independence affected these subsequent codifications of the laws of war. As recognition grows that compliance with the principle of distinction to limit violence against civilians depends on a firmer grasp of its legal, political, and historical evolution, The Image before the Weapon is a timely intervention in debates about how best to protect civilian populations.
