
Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj
Expertise
Democracy and Political ParticipationExtractive Industries and Multinational Corporations
Indigenous Rights
Land rights, Environment & Climate Change
Refugees, Migration, IDPs
Social Movements & Non-violent Resistance
State Violence
Transitional Justice
Women's Rights
Details
Media
Mujeres achí rememoran cómo fueron violadas hace 40 años por exPAC y los enfrentan en juicio Plaza Publica 17 Enero, 2022
Guatemala’s rural and Indigenous communities are hit hardest by COVID-19 NPR Dec 2021
Indigenous scholar, activist discusses racial inequality in Latin America, Medium.com, Jan, 2021
Organized indigenous communities and indigenous knowledge can prevent the spread of Covid19, The Americas Program, April 2020
Killings Of Guatemala’s Indigenous Activists Raise Specter Of Human Rights Crisis NPR, Jan 22, 2019
An Open Letter to President Donald J. Trump and the Government of the United States of America, Skylight, Oct. 2018
Why do children leave my country? Skylight, June 2018 with link to Spanish El Periodco
Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj is a Maya-K’iche’ social anthropologist, journalist and international activist from Guatemala for Indigenous communities in Central America. Dr. Nimatuj was instrumental in making racial discrimination illegal in Guatemala and is the lead protagonist featured in 500 Years, a Skylight documentary about Indigenous resistance movements. She serves on Skylight’s Board of Directors.
She was an expert witness in court on behalf of 35 Mayan Achi women survivors of sexual violence in their decades-long legal fight for justice against former Guatemalan paramilitaries. Five former paramilitaries were sentenced in January, 2022, to 30 years each for crimes against humanity in the 1980s during the civil war that ended in 1996.
She was a Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford’s Center for Latin American Studies 2019-2021 and in the fall of 2021 joined the University of Oregon anthropology department as a visiting professor, teaching a course about Indigenous women and territories in Latin America. .
Dr. Nimatuj writes a weekly newspaper column for El Periódico de Guatemala and has served on UN Women as a representative for Latin America and the Caribbean. She was the first Maya-K’iche’ woman to earn a doctorate in social anthropology in Guatemala. She was a visiting professor at the Watson Institute at Brown in 2018-2019, where she taught courses about Central and Latin American history and culture. She is part of a long line of struggle and resistance in her community since the Spanish invasion in 1524.
She is the author of the books: La pequeña Burguesia Comercial de Guatemala: Desigualdades de clasa, raza y género (2003), Pueblos indígenas, Estado y lucha por tierra en Guatemala: Estrategias de sobrevivencia y negociación ante la desigualdad globalizada (2008) and Lunas y Calendarios, colección poesía guatemalteca (2018).