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Malia Politzer is the executive editor of piqd.com, and an award-winning long-form journalist based out of Spain. She specializes in reporting on migration, international development, human rights issues and investigative reporting.
Originally from California, she's lived in China, Spain, Mexico and India, and reported from various countries in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Her primary beats relate to immigration, economics and international development. She has published articles in Huffington Post Highline, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue India, Mint, Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Reason Magazine, and the Phoenix New Times. She is also a regular contributor to Devex.
Her Huffington Post Highline series, "The 21st Century Gold Rush" won awards from the National Association of Magazine Editors, Overseas Press Club, and American Society of Newspaper Editors. She's also won multiple awards for feature writing in India and the United States.
Her reporting has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Institute For Current World Affairs, and the Global Migration Grant.
Degrees include a BA from Hampshire College and MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where was a Stabile Fellow at the Center for Investigative Journalism.
Is Canada to Blame for Human Rights Abuses in Guatemala?
This is not an easy read. Journalist Annie Hylton opens the article with a graphic depiction of gang rape so violent that one of the victims (who was pregnant at the time) lost her child, and another was left unable to ever conceive again. It doesn't get much better from there: With meticulous detail, drawing on documents and testimony, she makes a chilling case against Canadian mining companies and the Canadian government, showing how companies regularly hired security firms with backgrounds in anti-terrorism and a history of human rights abuses, which, in turn, raped and murdered local indigenous populations whose ancestral homelands happened to be on land with valuable natural resources.
Hylton shows how these violent confrontations have their origins in land disputes between the indigenous who have been living on the land for generations -- but often lack the legal documents to prove their claims -- and the Canadian mining companies who have legal rights to the land. Drawing on internal embassy documents, she shows how the Canadian government was complicit in the violence -- and took an active hand in "creating an environment that was favorable to Canadian mining companies" on one hand, while falling short of regulating their activities. For years they operated pretty much with impunity.
But that might soon change: With the help of Canadian attorneys, indigenous communities are suing for damages in a Canadian court. It's the first suit of its kind, and could herald an era of accountability for mining companies operating abroad. Any attempts for reparations in Guatemala are bound to fail: A Human Rights Watch report, referenced in the piece, finds that
“98 percent of crimes in Guatemala do not result in prosecutions" and that "corruption within the justice system, combined with intimidation against judges and prosecutors, contributes to high levels of impunity.”
Thus their only chance for justice, Hylton concludes, lies in Canada.
