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In depth

The Xinka people and their weight in eastern Guatemala's mining

Dossier
Social license and prior consultation23-licencia-social.md
Domain
Social license and prior consultationlicencia-social
Room
Law/ley
Audited
Audited

In the 2018 census (INE), 264,167 people self-identified as Xinka (1.8% of the population), against only 16,214 in 2002; the jump reflects the identity-claim movement that the Escobal litigation itself catalyzed (figures confirmed against IWGIA and INE's Compendio Estadístico de Pueblos). The Xinka people — not Maya, with their own language family — live in Jutiapa, Jalapa and Santa Rosa, exactly the eastern mining corridor (Escobal, Cerro Blanco). Judgment 4785-2017 settled their existence in the area of influence in court after their presence had been denied in the project's studies: denying or understating indigenous presence in the environmental impact assessment is the most repeated original error in the record (the same finding MICI made at Ixquisis).

The research is written in English; quoted figures, source names and the titles of legal instruments stay in the language their source published them in.

Figures

Self-identified Xinka populationINE / IWGIA
264,167 (1.8%)2018 Census
Xinka populationINE / IWGIA
16,2142002 Census

Sources

Organizations named in the answer

  • IWGIAPublishes 'The Indigenous World' (2020: Guatemala), the source of the Xinka census figure of 264,167 (1.8%).Other

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Related records

This layer is research: read from public sources by the archive's own team, every claim cited with the date it was consulted, and audited where it is marked so. It has not entered the verified store — no figure here was fetched back from its source or stamped with a retrieval time — so it wears no red provenance numeral and never mixes with the verified figures.