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How Indigenous Land and Water Defenders Strategized to Defend the Guatemalan People
This is part two of a two-part series on the Peaceful Resistance La Puya and Kappes v. Guatemala by Jennifer Moore at The Institute for Policy Studies and Ellen Moore at Earthworks. Read the first part here.
Nevada-based Kappes, Cassiday & Associates lost their international arbitration suit against Guatemala in December, 2025. The company was seeking damages because Guatemala’s courts had halted extraction at their gold mine there.
The Guatemalan government built its legal strategy in the case based on the legitimacy of the struggle of Peaceful Resistance La Puya, a social movement of Indigenous land and water defenders. Peaceful Resistance La Puya has maintained a 24-hour camp by the side of a road at the entrance to the mine for fourteen years.
The government’s case also relied on the wealth of information La Puya had gathered. La Puya provided information on the company’s failures to uphold Guatemalan environmental regulations, its shoddy environmental studies, incomplete permits, and the overwhelming social opposition to the project from the start.
Fourteen Years of Resistance and Repression
Since the resistance began in March 2012, La Puya has stood up to many challenges, including violent police repression by the Guatemalan government. La Puya has faced disinformation campaigns, divide and conquer tactics, intimidation and threats from a private security outfit staffed with ex-military personnel, as well as the trauma of legal persecution and intense police repression in order to facilitate the mine’s operation from 2014-2016.
Documenting Impact and Struggle
Like many frontline struggles opposing mining projects, the resistance built allies to document the human rights violations and to demonstrate the illegalities of the gold mine, including the fact that the project never had a valid municipal construction permit.
As well, La Puya worked with independent experts to evaluate the mining company’s environmental impact assessment and found serious deficiencies and gaps, although authorities granted KCA a license to operate anyway.
A History of State and Company Repression
In KCA’s arbitration suit, the company argued that it had faced discrimination as a result of the mine suspension and that the government failed to provide it with adequate protection and security from the peaceful resistance to continue expanding the project.
For people from La Puya, KCA’s claim was surreal and infuriating.
Alvaro Sandoval, from the nearby village of La Choleña, was indignant. He remembers that there were two permanent police check points while the mine was operating. One was on the road in front of the resistance camp and the other at the entrance to the mine.
It made me angry because it isn’t true that the state didn’t provide security to the company so that it could mine. Our bodies bore witness to the sacrifices, fears, anguish. And after all that the state did to us, in collusion with the company… It made me really mad and really upset.
Candelaria Carrera from the community of Carrizal in San Pedro Ayampuc
Weighing In on KCA’s Arbitration Case
Presenting an amicus curiae submission to the arbitration panel is the only formal channel of participation for third parties in ISDS cases. Amicus curiae (friend of the court) submissions are legal arguments presented by third parties who can share relevant information on cases.
However, the arbitration panel has no obligation to consider these requests. La Puya tried to make a submission and was refused.
Looking back, La Puya member Ana Sandoval thinks this was fortuitous: “In the end, we came out ahead… The amicus brief would have been just a single document presenting our arguments and that would have been it. But the relationship that developed with the government instead is important.”
The Very Difficult Decision to Collaborate with Their Oppressor
Around the time that La Puya was presenting its request to submit an amicus, the state’s lawyers approached the resistance to ask that they provide information and witnesses to support the state’s defense. The arrogance of the initial approach and the state’s role in repressing La Puya in order to open KCA’s mine provoked hard feelings and challenging discussions within the resistance.
“It is really difficult,” Candelaria recalls, “because after someone has been messing with your life for so long, and we’ve been here resisting and defending life, defending water, and then they finally notice that we’ve been fighting and then they come and ask that of us, after they’ve knocked us around, criminalized so many of us, beat us… It made us angry.”
But despite the conflicting feelings that the discussion provoked, La Puya decided to participate, contributing documentation and three witnesses who would testify to the arbitration panel.
Given the high stakes of the multi-million dollar arbitration, for Alvaro Sandoval, the decision went beyond the local interests of La Puya.
“We’re doing this to defend the people of Guatemala, and if we have to do our part, we have to do whatever we can.”
Alvaro Sandoval, Peaceful Resistance La Puya
The Decision Pays Off
While ISDS proceedings tend to be plagued with misinformation and omissions, the reliance on La Puya´s records helped keep the facts straight. At the same time, La Puya and their national and international allies also brought public attention to the injustice of KCA’s arbitration and its gold mine that should never have been approved.
Finally, after seven years of proceedings, the three-person arbitration panel ruled against KCA on almost all grounds in December 2025. It ordered the company to pay a portion of the government’s arbitration costs. However, the government would still have to pay over $4 million dollars in legal and arbitral costs.
KCA’s Loss: A Relief for La Puya and a Wake Up Call for Guatemala
The ruling was received by the Peaceful Resistance La Puya as an early Christmas gift. The outcome of this specific ISDS claim means the Guatemalan government will pay out less in public funds for a private mining project. But it also offers an important opportunity to reflect critically on how the investor protection system poses a wider threat to the defense of water, territory and Indigenous rights in Guatemala.
Candelaria Carrera said it was hard to contain her emotion when they heard the decision “in the interest of the Guatemalan people; to ensure that public services, which are already inadequate, are not even less capable of reaching the population.”
They also felt joy at the role La Puya had played, “by providing information and agreeing to give interviews… La Puya contributed to this arbitration ruling in favor of Guatemala.”