Ana Laura Rojas
Ana Laura Rojas is a woman human rights defender and social communicator in Guatemala. Ana Laura is a member of the Coordinadora de Comunidades Afectadas por la empresa Trecsa (a subsidiary of Grupo Energía de Bogotá), part of the Red de Integración Orgánica and the Observatorios de DDHH de los Pueblos. She is dedicated to socio-environmental work and the integration of excluded groups into community activities, with a focus on food sovereignty and the development of rural communities. As a result of her work in defense of territory and access to means of production, she has suffered death threats and persecution. Ana Laura has also seen her work in defense of territory criminalised. The defender is an investigator of the expansion plans for the transmission of high voltage electricity for massive extractivism, with the aim of democratising information to communities affected by these plans, so that they can carry out their own processes of defense of the territory, generating materials for denunciation and dissemination through community research.
HRDs in Guatemala are subjected to death threats, physical attacks, acts of harassment, surveillance, stigmatisation, judicial harassment, arbitrary detention, forced disappearance and killings. Many of the violations are carried out by clandestine security structures and illegal groups. The exceptionally high level of impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators increases the risk exponentially for HRDs.
