Source La Hora

Author Carlos Figueroa Ibarra

In the early hours of Tuesday, April 9, 2019, I learned with regret OF the murder of Leonel Nájera, activist with the Peasant Development Committee (Codeca) and promoter of the Movement for the Liberation of Peoples (MLP).

He was shot dead on the road that leads to La Libertad, Petén department. In addition to promoting the party that is driving the presidential campaign of indigenous leader Thelma Cabrera and the community leader Neftalí López, Leonel was active in supporting «the resistance». This is what CODECA calls the fight against the abusive electricity tariffs charged by Energuate, the company that provides a face saving screen for the transnational companies that own the country’s electric power.

The murder of Leonel brings to 9 the number of members of CODECA and the MLP who have been murdered since 2018. Today, CODECA is in the cross hairs because it has united its social struggle to the political struggle that it carries out through the MLP.

CODECA is a nascent but thriving social force on the way to being a political force. It is a broadly representative organisation of men and women with calloused hands and faces tanned by the sun. It represents the strength of working people and those condemned to work like slaves on the land in Guatemala. The General Programme and Government Plan of the MLP proposes structural reforms that would challenge the control of the oligarchy and establish a decent standard of living for everyone .

Its strategic objective is a popular and plurinational Constituent Assembly, «the democratisation of local capitalism» and a fight against corruption. The programme that is now being developed includes the recovery of state services and goods as well as economic, political, environmental, legal, security, educational and inter-cultural reforms. CODECA-MPL is confronted by the interests of both licit and illicit capital which would be affected by its claims. I call on all good men and women not to be indifferent to the fierce attack of which they are a target..