A state of emergency was declared on May 1st in this municipality of Huehuetenango department. Since then, military and police officers have illegally raided houses and arrested the population who oppose a project by company Hidro Santa Cruz.

Peasant Francisca Hernandez was one of the speakers at the conference in Guatemala, capital city of the country. She lives in El Recreo village and said that her husband, a teacher, Esteban Bernabe, was arrested on May 4th.

Francisca doesn’t know why her husband is still under custody, since nobody told them under what charges he was arrested. It is clear that he didn’t commit any crime and that his arrest responds to the fact that he actively participated in the community consultation that resulted in the rejection to the extractive project. The peasant warned that Hidro Santa Cruz’s plans will end up "drying the land and leaving people with no food".

In addition to her case, Francisca talked about the situation in El Recreo in general since president Otto Perez Molina decreed the state of emergency.

She said, for instance, that all men in her community have left: half of them are in Mexico and we don’t know anything about the rest. The women that stayed in their houses are in danger, and there have been cases of sexual harassments by military officers.

She also made reference to the fact that these situations take us back to the saddest history of the country. In a place well-known by Francisca, called Piedra Blanca, one of the most remembered events of the "scorched land" policy by dictator Efrain Rios Montt, most of the population was locked in a school and set on fire. Francisca survived that massacre because her parents had fled to the mountains.