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For Francisco Chávez and Gaspar Cobo, it’s still painful to realize that they’re no longer home in the Cuchumatanes mountains of Quiché, Guatemala. Now they’re in El Paso, Texas, where they await their asylum hearings a process that’s been marked by the cruel realities of the hostile U.S. immigration system. Even though U.S. intervention in Central America triggered many of the conditions that forced Chávez and Cobo to flee in 2019, there’s no guarantee they’ll be given permanent refuge here. But they’re fighting.
State persecution and violence have been present in the lives of Chávez, 45, and Cobo, 32, since before they were even born. The Maya Ixil leaders are part of a multigenerational resistance against omnipresent colonial and imperialist forces, which for centuries have triggered the displacement of their communities and the destruction and exploitation of sacred land and natural resources.
Fleeing death in Guatemala, two Ixil Maya activists hope to continue their defense of indigenous rights from the US â if they can stay
By Jazmine Ulloa Globe Staff,Updated May 1, 2021, 5:46 p.m.
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Francisco Chavez Raymundo (left) and Gaspar Cobo Corio were in El Paso, Texas, on April 15. They waited in Mexico for 17 months to get asylum in El Paso.Christ Chavez For The Boston Globe
EL PASO â They left their Ixil Maya town deep in the Cuchumatanes mountains of Guatemala just before dawn and without much time to say goodbye.
Francisco Chávez Raymundo, 45, and Gaspar Cobo Corio, 32, had been part of a tight circle of indigenous activists who in the spring of 2013 helped bring a military dictator to trial over the 1982 genocide of the Ixil people, a Mayan ethnic group that became one of the main targets of systematic racism, rape, and forced displacement during the Guatemalan civil war.