Rights Action has just released this video of the evictions in Izabal. Photos are by James Rodriguez and video footage is by Steven Schnoor.

Reuters AlertNet (11-01-2007) have covered the recent evictions in Izabal over the dispute between a nickel mining company and the local community.

"More than 500 Guatemalan police and soldiers have evicted Mayan Indian squatters who had been illegally occupying the property of a Canadian nickel miner since last September, a company spokeswoman said on Thursday.

Some 300 Mayans, who want the company to cede land for subsistence farming, left peacefully as police and troops came with an eviction order, said Regina Rivera, miner Skye's spokesperson in Guatemala.

Some left over the weekend when they heard news of the planned eviction and 155 others abandoned the area on Monday and Tuesday after the police arrived, said Rivera.

Skye plans to reopen the long-dormant Fenix nickel project near Guatemala's Lake Izabal and begin producing 11,000 tonnes of ferro-nickel in 2009."

The story was covered previously by Prensa Libre (09-01-2007) in Guatemala. But there is much more information on MiMundo.org's blog. It's written by James Rodriguez and spans  the build up to this eviction from November 2006. It contains personal accounts across different posts of the evictions and many powerful photos (also on Flickr).

There's more in information on the background to this latest eviction from website Mining Watch Canada written by Dawn Paley (11-01-2007) in El Estor, Guatemala. Dawn's blog's here- Reporter Zero.

Update (15-01-07)

The Guatemala Human Rights Commission (GHRC/USA) is running an urgent action on the evictions here. According to the GHRC they numbers of people evicted is significantly higher than AP have reported (and what we quoted above):

"On January 8, 430 police officers and roughly 200 military personnel arrived in the communities of La Unión and La Pista, located in the municipality of El Estor in the eastern department of Izabal, to carry out an eviction order of 308 Maya Q’eq’chí families. The following day, on January 9, at 10:00am, 175 more Maya Q’eq’chí families were violently expelled from the nearby communities of La Revolución and La Paz."