2014-2017 Criminal Complaints against the Mayor of San Miguel Ixtahuacán

In January 2014, the Front in Defense of San Miguel Ixtahuacán (FREDEMI) and the Pluri-Cultural Legal Association of Guatemala (PLURIJUR) filed a criminal complaint against the Mayor of San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Ovidio Joel Domingo Bámaca, for the crime of servitude committed against five local communities who were the beneficiaries of precautionary measures granted by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) against the Guatemalan State and the Goldcorp Inc. (and its wholly owned subsidiary, Montana Exploradora de Guatemala, S.A.) in relation to the exploitation of the Marlin Mine (No a la Mina, 2014). These measures required that Guatemala take steps to ensure that affected communities have access to safe drinking water (See the Legal Action, entitled "2007- IACHR Petition and Precautionary Measures regarding Marlin Mine Authorization and Mayan Communities", for more detail).

In order to comply with these measures, the Mayor required community members to, among other things, (1) provide free labour for building required infrastructure; (2) provide free labour to extract, without prior consultation, natural resources in order to construct said infrastructure; and (3) pay rights of way for lands on which said infrastructure was built. The complainants argued that these requirements violated the American Convention of Human Rights and the Guatemalan Criminal Code. 

This action was one of three taken by FREDEMI and PLURIJUR against the Mayor, of which one was rejected by the Supreme Court of Justice, the other included a constitutional challenge before the Supreme Court regarding pretrial rights, and the third was assigned to a judge (Plurijur, 2015). The decision relating to the constitutional challenge was released in February 2017, dismissing the claim (Constitutional Court, 2017).