On February 8, 2014, 55 youth from Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador gathered in Panajachel, Sololá, Guatemala for Cultural Survival's First Central American Youth Forum.

By Alyssa Macy, International Indian Treaty Council

Francisco Cali Tzay, Mayan Kaqchikel from Guatemala, was elected on February 3, 2014 to a two-year term as President of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on the first day of its 84^th session. Cali Tzay is the first Indigenous expert to hold such a position in the UN system.

Eight Indigenous communities in northern Huehuetenango have joined together to defend their traditional territories against transnational projects.

Juan de Leon Tuyuc Velasquez (Kaqchikel Maya), a former guerrilla commander during Guatemala’s 1960-1996 civil war, was killed on January 15, 2014 in Solola by unknown gunmen. Velasquez is the brother of Rosalinda Tuyuc, founder of National Association of Guatemalan Widows (CONAVIGUA), a leading human rights organization representing Indigenous women whose husbands died in the civil war.

On January 11-12, 2014, over 20 women and men from the municipality of Huitan, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala took part in a second radio exchange with Radio Acodim Nampix of Ixtahuacán, Huehuetenango. The main goal of the exchange was to guide and motivate the committed community members of Huitan on how to get their radio project up and moving.

Ryann Dear is the newest volunteer on our Community Radio Project team in Guatemala. She is a recent graduate from Boston University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Anthropology and Archaeology. She worked as an intern for the community radio project with the Cultural Survival team in Cambridge for five months this past spring. She was a great fit with Cultural Survival from the beginning, and is now getting the opportunity to see another side of our organization, working alongside Indigenous Community Radio activists and volunteers in Guatemala.

Indigenous peoples in Guatemala rely on community radio to keep their culture, language, and traditions alive as well as to inform their communities about issues and events relevant to their lives. Because of its relatively low cost, community radio is an accessible tool. In some of the most remote areas of the country, many communities do not have access to electricity, but many have small battery-powered radios making it important means of communications within indigenous communities and among them.

Cultural Survival’s Community Radio Program team is days away from the final event of our project aimed at improving participation and integration of Indigenous youth from Belize, Guatemala and El Salvador through community radio. With the generous support of our donors and FLACSO Costa Rica, FLACSO El Salvador, PNUD, Unión Europea, and PAIRCA II, we participated in and coordinated two successful events in the past five months and are excited to close our project with what we are hoping to be our most fruitful event yet.

Peter Bol is a 22 year-old community radio volunteer from the Toledo District of Belize. He has been volunteering with the community radio Ak’Kutan Radio for just 4 months now, after meeting another community radio volunteer at a workshop on Mopan Mayan hieroglyphs in August of this year. He was interested in volunteering with the radio due to his awareness of the marginalization experienced by Indigenous communities of the Toledo District. According to Peter, “There have been a lot of barriers between the Mayan culture and the rest of the country, such as language and illiteracy.

In a groundbreaking decision, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala ruled last week that community consultations against mining projects should be considered as binding legal decisions. The government is now obligated to respect the results of consultas populares or community referendums regarding mining projects.

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